What if they had a pneumatic tube at the pump to send money to the register? I know they don't do this so you have to go inside and buy shit but I can dream of a world with more pneumatic tubes in it.
this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2026
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Everytime I'm at the bank and see the little pneumatic tubes I'm saddened by the fact that they are not used everywhere
Yeah it really sucks
Oo, I know this one! Several reasons, all of them boiling down to fairly straightforward pragmatism.
The easiest answer is that storing flammable material inside a gasoline dispenser just generally sounds like a bad idea. Similarly, storing cash in the unattended pumps themselves invites attempts to steal the pumps, which not only would lead to expensive repairs but comes with the additional risk of causing a large gas spill or fire/explosion from damage caused in the attempt.
Additionally, gas stations are the most commonly robbed business regardless of country. Storing cash in the pumps means an attendent would have to physically go out and remove the cash from each one, a time consuming process where the attendant would be in the open, distracted and carrying large sums of cash next to several extremely convenient exit routes. And it adds an entire additional complex mechanical system to the pump, which introduces an additional vector for downtime if it breaks/jams/etc.
you CAN do that — go inside and say "$30 on pump 3"
you pay cash in advance and it cuts off when you hit $30
I always lowball it when I do this. Do they give you the extra back if you don't use all of it?
No, you have to put the extra gas in your pockets for later, like a buffet
that's what plastic shopping bags are for.
I hear styrofoam coolers are perfect for this
Yup, just go back inside for your change.
You don't even need to do that if you stop at an Arco station. They have machines for this exact purpose.
We've got stations in NZ where you register the car's numberplate in the app. The station has cameras. You roll up, start pumping, and then drive off. It'll bill you later.
Super simple and haven't heard of anyone having issues with it
Interesting. What if you put a fake plate on your car?
Then it wouldn't work? It unlocks the pump if it recognises your plate in its system. If they are smart they could also detect make and model or also geo reference your location via the app.
I mean a fake plate that resembles a real one that someone else has registered.
People are probably more honest in NZ. In the US people are regularly screwed over all the time (usually by companies just like this) so we're primed to screw over others at every opportunity.
I think the uptake is low enough you would have to stalk a fuel station and try and watch for someone using it and not using the other method of paying from the app. But if the fuel station is using number plate recognition, plus colour and make recognition, which is easy with machine vision these days. You would have to wait until someone with the same model as you comes through.
In NZ, never heard of this. I don't really consume marketing material though. What stations do this / what app?
That actually sounds really nice I love that idea
Maybe by forcing you to go inside you're more likely to purchase something? Or maybe it's about the potential for crime? They would effectively become ATMs with less security.
They are pretty standard here in Japan. You can pay cash or credit at the pump. Never a need to go inside. You select how much you want to pay, put in the money, and if it clicks off before the end it’ll give you change.
You can do that in the UK and many other countries, when paying by card. You guys only seemed to discover the merits of wheelie bins recently, so you'll catch up at some point.
We have card payments at the pumps, and the garbage can thing was very much a weird NYC thing.
Manhattan (and to an extent NYC in general) is a fascinatingly odd case.
The reason why manual trash bag pickup stuck around so long is due to the near complete lack of useful alleyways and incredibly dense curbside parking, meaning that trash set out for collection had to either be placed on the sidewalk (the only available space) and carried between cars to the truck, or in the case of front load dumpsters wheeled out across the sidewalk from a restricted alley to a waiting hook loader (very few NYC alleys are wide enough to fit a compactor truck of any configuration, let alone allow them to orient for successful operator-in-cab pickup).
Add to that the complexity of most residential buildings or apartments not having a space where bins can be easily stored, and it becomes a pretty challenging problem to solve. Converting 30,000 spaces for the new Empire Bins / designated collection spots is a massive change to the city operations, but also the only way this could be feasibly implemented. The logistical issues have been so cool to watch being addreesed in real-time, super excited to see how the Sept 8th deadline plays out. 30/70 odds on no issues vs. Mad Max: Trash Armageddon.
(We've had modern wheelie bins for at least decades elsewhere in the country. Heck, the US invented both tip-loading for wheeled bins and compactor garbage trucks, though nobody can really claim wheelie bin invention; examples of proto-wheelie bins (wheeled trash carts per-business or large household which were emptied on a schedule) have been found in Pompeii, and there's debate on examples being found even further back)
They also have ad on the pump displays so let's hope the motion of ideas only goes one way.
There are such gas stations in Europe. I operated one more than a decade ago in Poland. Was part of Neste Group.
It would have a cash safe inside that we would pass to a security bank car once a few days once it was getting full. Card payments were also possible.
You’d choose a maximum amount and it would give you just that much fuel.
It was tried back in the late 1970s or early 1980s. There were pumps where you sat a dollar bill onto a tray and pushed it into the pump, one at a time. That was back when you couldn't usually buy gas 24 hours a day and gas was less than $1 a gallon. I'm guessing potential drawbacks were fake money, and cash money sitting in the pumps waiting for thieves.
I would think the core issue is that station owners don’t want potentially tens of thousands of dollars in cash accruing in outdoor pumps to attract would-be thieves. Even if the cash were decently protected, any attempt to get to it could render a pump unworkable, costing more money than the cash in the pump.
In the uk the pumps have this settable on them
I imagine it's just the added difficulty that the dollar dispensers are finicky and break down enough when dealing with small amounts of money. There's a reason why coke machines themselves are shifting more to card payments now that everythings over a few dollars. Plus being outdoors overnight is kind of a security nightmare as they don't want people taking crowbars to them. hoping for cash (even when there's no cash in them)
How about a Coke machine that gives you 23 cents of Coke?
Anything mechanical adds more risk for failure. And given how stupid gas pump software is, it wouldn't surprise me in the least if the cash insert mechanism is broken that it would disable the pump even when there are other payment options (such as paying cash inside or using a card at the pump).
Yeah let's not add more points of failure to an already-failure-prone system.
There are stations that offer this exact service.
As others said if you go inside they can do this. I've seen pumps that take cash, but that was one station in the 1980s and it was a weird kiosk that I've never seen elsewhere.
My guess would be that there's no way to refund overpayment if the tank becomes full
There is, if you use cash you just go back in to get the change and if using a card it will only actually take what was used. Basically just puts a hold on the account and finalizes at the end of the transaction.
The question was about cash and not card, so I have no feedback for that.
I do question if the goal is to pay at the pump with cash whether it's ideal to go inside to get change anyways. But it is a feasible solution IF a person overpays, and presumably a person would have a good enough handle most of the time to say "I can put 20 dollars in and not go over" so it's not something that would happen all the time.
Would potential theft become an issue because of large amounts of cash in a machine outside? Or potential robbery when said machine is unloaded? Outside of that I can't think of a reason not to implement such a thing.