Places to avoid

Perhaps I should start a list of places to avoid. These are businesses that don't understand customers. For several months I'd regularly shopped at an ARCO station at the corner of Paradise Road and Tropicana Avenue. Tonight there was a new sign on the pump saying credit cards had to go inside to pay. If I'll pay the ATM-tax imposed by the station owners I can pay at the pump, if not I have to go inside.

It seems this is probably to get more customers to use the ATM instead of the credit card function of the pump and to shift the costs from the profitable company to the individual consumer. With a little good luck the plan will fail, however. In my case at least, they have gone from a customer spending a few hundred dollars a month at their store to a non-customer. I'll gladly stop a block away and not have the hassle of going inside to pay.