Pumping Your Own Gas—Yes!—in Oregon

The 'Portlandia' state has rolled back a quirky 75-year-old tradition

Willamette River, Oregon

Welcome, all. This being August and the height of summer road trip season, today we begin a series of occasional travel and driving stories featuring California and other western states. Today’s featured state: Oregon, and the end of one of its quirkiest traditions. As always, enjoy!—Kevin

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It was something I had never done before. Nor was it anything I had ever seen anyone else do either. This novel event occurred last Friday at the Fred Meyer station off Commercial Street in the Willamette Valley city of Salem, Oregon.

The last word in the last sentence is key. In all the times I have been to Oregon I had never filled the tank of my vehicle with gasoline. This was always done by someone else, a paid attendant. It was the law.

Clearly, though, something had changed. I looked around. Other people on my side of the gas pumps were doing the same as me. But on the other side of the pumps, Fred Meyer employees in red safety vests were carrying on as if were 1999: Waiting on their customers who remained seated in their vehicles.

Curious about this new (to me) phenomenon, I stepped across to ask one of the red-vested attendants about it. He was a surly young white dude with geeky glasses and short curly brown hair.

“I thought you couldn’t pump your own gas in Oregon. It’s been a while since I’ve been here. I’m from out of state. California.”

“Really?” he said. “I couldn’t tell.”

I watched as he did his work. Approaching the side of a Ford sedan he chatted politely with a woman driver whose window was down. Apparently the attendant’s sarcasm was reserved for out-of-staters. She handed him a credit card or a debit card and he walked around the rear of the sedan and inserted it into the card reader in a gas pump.

“I thought it was the law here. That you had to have someone do it for you.”

“It was,” came his reply. “For 75 years it was the law here. They changed it. Last year around this time, August.” His tone was one of disgust. This was not a turn of events he was happy with. “Now stations have to give you the choice. Self-service or an attendant. Half and half, it’s supposed to be.”

To me the law had always seemed a little odd, and kind of stupid. No other state in the nation had outlawed self-service stations. On the other hand, it was one of those quirky Portlandia-style things that made Oregon Oregon. People were free to go blind smoking legal reefer but not pump their own gas. But hey, any state that produced Ken Kesey and Steve Prefontaine and serves as the headwaters for the Klamath River is all right by me.

"Why? Why’d they change it?”

“Money, I guess,” he answered. The mild features of his face showed unhappiness as if the new law was a poison-tipped arrow aimed at him, which, in a way, it was. “Costs more money to pay people like me to pump the gas.”

The vineyards of Willamette Valley.

Oregon’s no self-service law came into being in the early 1950s, not coincidentally at the same time that self-service stations were beginning to be introduced in its trend-setting neighbor to the south. Credit for the idea belongs to a Los Angeles man named George Urich, an independent owner-operator who like other independents was battling for business against the big-brand national chains such as Chevron.

He thought if he didn’t have to pay employees to pump the gas and wash the windows and check the oil that he could pass on the savings to his customers in the form of lower prices. Lower prices would entice more people to fill up, and the higher volume would return more profits to him.

His station, the first self-service station in the U.S., had a distinctively Southern California spin to it. “Five or six pretty girls in sweaters and slacks roller skate from island to island making change and collecting,” reported a Newsweek correspondent. “A supervisor in a glass booth directs them by loudspeaker and keeps an eye out for customers violating the no-smoking regulations.”

Many people back then opposed this “Gas-ateria,” as another writer called it. They liked having attendants do the work for them. They also recognized that it meant people were losing jobs. Chevron and the other majors especially hated Urich’s low gas prices, not the direction they wished their prices to go. (By the way, the second self-service station in the U.S. was a Rotten Robbie in San Jose, California.)

The new Oregon law speaks to the pricing issue. It requires the price for a gallon of gas at the self-service pumps to be the same as what is charged at the attendant pumps. Logically, of course, this makes little sense because one of the reasons for having self-service in the first place was to lower prices for consumers. But by mandating a uniform pricing structure Oregon’s lawmakers evidently sought to protect the jobs of attendants, even as they were placing those same jobs in obvious peril.

On our way out of the state we stopped at a Shell station in Ashland just off Interstate 5. An attendant in street clothes with a Shell patch on the pocket of his shirt approached me asking if I would like him to pump my gas. I declined, saying that I was from California and had pumped my own gas for so long it felt weird to have someone else do it for me.

“I understand,” he said. He was in his early twenties like the Fred Meyer guys, of East Asian descent with dark hair and a nice friendly smile.

“You still get paid though, right? No matter if a person uses you or not.”

“Right, right. Oh yeah,” he reassured me. “No worries.”

Continuing my anecdotal survey of the new law, I asked him what he thought of it. “It’s pretty good. There are lots like you, who pump their gas. But there are still plenty that I help.”

His more positive attitude may have been due to the fact that he was from California and had only moved to Ashland two weeks before, to be with family. He needed a job and found one fast at the station. He too had grown up in self-service gas culture, he told me.

Thinking back on it, it occurred to me that I had not entirely grown up in that culture. When I was a boy there was a Union 76 station in the hills near our house. It was run by Bob Schmitz, a lean, energetic figure who wore a collared blue Union 76 shirt when he came out to your car to ask what you needed. “What can I do for you today?” he said, wiping his hands of grease with a red cloth because he’d been back in the garage fixing somebody’s car. “Fill ‘er up? Check the oil?”

Bob was a family man. The Schmitz family lived in our neighborhood. We played baseball and went to school with his sons. If it wasn’t Bob waiting on you, it was one of his sons or maybe a teenage kid who had a part-time job at the station after school.

Bob’s gas station, like Bob, is long gone now, and so are those times. Nowadays most people roll into a gas station, insert a card, withdraw it, stick the nozzle in the fuel tank slot, wait impatiently until it’s done, and roll out again without any human interaction at all. It’s just the way it’s done now, like so many other aspects of today’s digitized culture.

AI, robotics, self-driving vehicles, ATMs, grocery store scanners; so many whiz-bang innovations all seeming to lead to the same place: Reducing or eliminating entirely the human element.

I don’t suppose there is anything anyone can do about that, and I’m sure there are many people who wouldn’t want to do anything about it. That’s “progress.” So it has been since the days of Henry Ford’s Model T assembly line and well before that, actually. Sure there are downsides but on balance it’s a good thing. We’re all moving forward, right?

Maybe I’m just a foolish sentimentalist. But the next time I go to Oregon I’m going to pull into the local Fred Meyer and do what I didn’t do before and ask the attendant to fill it up for me. Who knows? If I’m real nice maybe he’ll clean the windshield and go under the hood and check the line on the dipstick to see if I need a quart of oil.

Mount Shasta, on the road coming back into California, near Yreka.