Gas Station Sign Love

Ato decorate urban intersections and riding high in rural interstate exits, the gas station sign announces the state of the consumer’s economy. For the past several weeks, the economic effects of the Iran war have been represented more or less to the whole world through their photos and videos. It’s easy to see why: Gasoline prices are always displayed on signs, in large numbers that span the entire area. That structure, which is unlike anything else in economics, makes the gas price signal a kind of key to understanding American life.

Long before financial data could be easily tracked in real time, gasoline provided a glimpse into changing market forces, visible during the commute to work or the drive home from Kmart. In the analog era, workers changed the numbers on the reader board multiple times a day, often from the top of the ladder. Eventually, signs were digitized and prices lit up in LED displays—easily changing to neon at night.

Drivers – which, in America, is simply to say citizens – learn to watch gas prices closely, to always compare. Unlike the cars themselves, no status is given to gassing. Foods like eggs and milk may be associated with lifestyle choices or socioeconomic status, but gas is just gas. Even premium gas is just gas. It’s the product you pay for, the price of which is known around the world and charged more or less equally. It’s the closest ordinary people come to interacting directly with the pure chaos of the market.

Nusually, when you buy something– a loaf of bread, a ribbed polo shirt – you get a finished, usable item. These are known as productand they are distinguished: The bread can contain seeds or refined wheat flour or whole flour; a polo shirt can be called Ralph Lauren or Lacoste. You don’t have to buy product which is used to create products – wheat, cotton – in almost any condition. They are no different, right.

Technically, petrol is a good finish too. A petroleum company refines crude oil, a byproduct, into the oil you put in your car. And yet, gas acts more like a commodity than a good. Gas is basically nothing more than the price you pay.

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Almost no other consumer purchase can be boiled down to just its price. Other products have been somewhat undifferentiated, such as bottled water and store-bought sugar, but they have another important characteristic: your perception of the taste of the water, or how the packaging fits in your hand or looks on the shelf. Even electricity is not good whose price you meet as part of the built environment; is a service whose cost of use is estimated for future withdrawal into a bill. Gasoline has no packaging, and you don’t recognize it (beyond the initial smell)—but you do do it determine its variable cost.

Many industries, in the course of their development, move from products to brand differentiation, and from products to services. Coffee went from, well, coffee to Folgers to Starbucks. Petrol has done the opposite.

When cars were new, gasoline functioned more as a service than a commodity, much less a commodity. You would go into a station and someone would pump gas for you; you wouldn’t normally know the price in advance. Oil companies—Standard Oil and Texaco, for example—competed in service. The attendant may be unusually friendly and efficient, or check your car, which was probably not reliable at the time.

Gasoline price competition came only after enough cars, stations and brands arrived on the scene, in the late 1930s. This is when prices began to appear more prominently on signs and station windows. Early gas station signs were smaller than today’s, and still featured the name and image of the gas company. Price tags began to play a political role as well: The Revenue Act of 1932 established a one-cent gas tax, along with a 9/10-cent price tag that oil companies used to show that they were passing on almost all costs.

From the 1950s to the 1970s, price displays moved from pumps and windows to street signs, which grew larger so that drivers in fast-moving vehicles could see them from a distance. But the big gas station price signals we know today didn’t come until after the oil shock of 1973. The price of crude oil quadrupled in six months after October 1973, when OPEC blocked sales to countries that supported Israel in the Yom Kippur War. The second shock, after the Iranian Revolution of 1979, sent prices even higher. In photos from that era, you see many gas station billboards advertising there is no gasbut few are similar to today’s signs. In the 1970s, prices remained mostly fixed at the pump or on regular boards at a low level.

That changed in the early 1980s. Thanks to the two oil booms of the last decade, gasoline was cemented in the American mind as a commodity subject to great volatility, not a part of car maintenance. Gas stations moved from selling a trusted service to a listed price product, which is difficult to distinguish from the crude oil that is produced.

Gas, once cheap and easy to find, was now seen as scarce, unstable and politically charged. The largest, most visible part of the billboard advertising where to buy gas was no longer the company logo but the current price per gallon.

Gasoline state as the visible, controversial price of freedom of travel has been universal for 45 years. Despite its many shortcomings, gasoline unites Americans in a common sense. It gives us an inside window on global affairs. It provides a common thread for the speech pocketbook, the same economic and weather. It provides a measure of political expediency, because the person in charge can be blamed for creating or failing to prevent conditions that made life more expensive—openly and demonstrably.

From the May 2020 issue: The way to drive in America

But the role of petrol in this dance is decreasing. Electric cars do not need to be charged, and produce very little emissions. So EVs also mark the end of the gas station sign for all. Almost no one knows what rate they are paying for electricity—or even a kilowatt hour of the product it is. They certainly don’t hang billboards advertising fees in their driveways.

EVs allow drivers who can afford an expensive vehicle ($11,000 more on average ahead of a conventional car, although lifetime operating costs are lower) so they no longer have to deal with the geography, politics, and traditional culture of gas stations. The unconcerned culture of consumers about the price of gas cannot hold on to them in solidarity at breakfast. The EV driver community doesn’t need Big Gulps or Buc-ee’s. Where will we buy our processed hand pies?

Because the current oil shock is the first to occur since EVs became widely available, the energy crisis caused by the Iran war marks the first time that the increase in gas prices cannot be interpreted as a global phenomenon. Gasoline is dirty, smelly, toxic, and environmentally objectionable. But it’s also incredibly romantic. Although we must give it up—even if there’s never been a better time to buy an electric car—gas has long held our car-dependent nation together. Now the symbol of the gas station no longer represents life together with its mourning.

Maybe it can take on a new meaning, just as his posters showed earlier changes. Once a symbol of everyone’s negative but shared relationship with goods and the global economy standing on top, the symbol of the gas station now also represents the ability to withdraw from that economy, to speed through without being shocked by everything that stands in its way.