I'm too special to fill out a form so I'll drive off without paying

[Gibbo]

All of the self-service (which is.. all of them, there are no full-service stations around here that I know of) stations around here have been pre-pay/pay-at-pump for years. Only since the arrival of pay-at-the-pump has this been true though. Pre-pay was probably seen as too "customer unfriendly" before, but within a year or so after the card readers showed up on pumps, every station required pre-pay.

I remember thinking pre-pay was silly, when I was a kid. "How are you supposed to know how much to pay when you haven't filled up yet?" Now I don't think anything of swiping my card before filling up.

Asda decided to change so you would pay at the pump using your card. The result was that people stopped using them and went elsewhere as they should "have the choice of how to pay". When our nearby Asda petrol station changed we trebled our petrol sales. As we weren't expecting such a large increase of customers we ran completely dry and had people whining about how they had to go without fuel for the day. When we said that there was a nearby Asda they would say "but I'm not going there because it's card only!" So even when faced with going without fuel, they still wouldn't go to Asda.

[Bella_Vixen]

Unfortunately that kind of defeats the whole purpose of the convenience of Pay at the Pump.

And sometimes things would get a little busy, and the employee(s) wouldn't always have time to replace pump paper immediately...if they even knew that it was out in the first place...