Self-serve gas comes to Oregon’s big cities

Alann Madden

PORTLAND, Ore. (CN) — At a Shell station on Northeast Killingsworth Street in Northeast Portland, employees long tasked with pumping gas for customers are adjusting to a new era of self-service.

“Well, it makes my job easier,” said Kevin Snyder, one attendant on duty on Friday. After years of helping customers with their gas, the station is now allocating half its pumps to self-serve and diesel customers.

Oregon’s new self-serve gas law went into effect on Friday, allowing drivers in all counties to pump their own gas for the first time in 72 years. But while some residents may find the change to be novel, not everyone is pleased.

Some Oregonians worry about what the changes mean for things like safety and accessibility. Meanwhile, some attendants worry self-service could affect their own job security.

Take Bob Hall, 74, who has worked as a gas-station attendant for 55 years, most recently at a Chevron station in downtown Portland. Hall worries the change could see him lose his job, especially because he has a disability that he says could make it hard for him to find another one.

“You wouldn’t pay somebody just to stand there, would you?” Hall asked rhetorically as he waited for his next customer on Friday.

But attendants like Hall don’t just stand there — they do the dirty work of pumping gas while customers wait in their car. It’s an anachronistic Oregon tradition that’s existed since 1951, when the state first banned self-serve gas pumps.

At the time, Oregon was hardly alone: Cities across the country had also banned self-serve, citing concerns like fire safety, environmental hazards and accessibility issues. Since then, though, almost everywhere else in the United States has done away with their self-serve bans, leaving New Jersey as the only other state with comparable restrictions.

Meanwhile, Oregon has been slowly chipping away at its own ban since 2015. That year, lawmakers passed House Bill 3011, which permitted gas stations in counties with less than 40,000 residents to allow customers to fill their tanks between 6 p.m. and 6 a.m. Two years later, lawmakers passed House Bill 2482, eliminating those time restrictions for small counties in eastern Oregon.

This latest law, House Bill 2426, goes further still. It allows gas stations in non-rural counties to designate up to 50% of gas pumps for self-service, leaving the remaining pumps for drivers who need or prefer an attendant to fill their tanks.

HB 2426 also prohibits gas stations from charging different prices between options, providing some relief to those already nervous about rising gas prices. It cleared Oregon’s House of Representatives on March 20 with a 47-10 vote before ultimately passing the Senate on June 21.

Still, after decades of having attendants pump gas for them, Oregonians are feeling ambivalent about the new reforms. When Democratic Governor Tina Kotek solicited feedback about the new law, she received thousands of emailed comments, with an even mix for and against.

Bill sponsors have said the new law will help with labor shortages around the state. The new law “provides Oregonians choice at the pump,” state Representative Janeen Sollman, a Democrat from Hillsboro outside of Portland, said in a June 21 statement. She hoped the bill would help find “a balance between consumer preferences, business needs and employment considerations.”

Opponents, meanwhile, fear self-service will create a more dangerous work environment for gas station employees. Even without self-service, after all, they already deal with customers who smoke at the pumps, don’t turn their engines off or worse still, drive off with pumps in their vehicles.

“For someone who spends 10 minutes at a gas station, this may not seem like something that is dangerous,” Brandon Venable, a Pendleton resident and gas-station attendant, told state lawmakers this year. “When you deal with this for eight plus hours a day, it’s reality.”

As the change rolls out across the Beaver State, it remains to be seen how new self-serve gas pumps will affect issues like attendant employment and safety.

And for now at least, attendants have mixed feelings on the new law. Some attendants may fear losing their job, but “not here,” said Marsha Booth, an employee at the Fastrak gas station on Northeast Broadway. ”Everyone is happy" with the change, she said, and "we've assured our customers that there will always be someone here to help."

Chris Tudor, another employee at the station, did have some concerns about the changes.

Those concerns, though, had nothing to do with his job security.

“The only thing I’m worried about is people trying to top-off,” Tudor said — though for now at least, many customers are sticking with what they know. So far, he noted, only about 10% of customers have tried pumping their own gas. Most are still relying on attendants, as they’ve done for more than 70 years.