- 29 Apr 2018 01:50
#14909985
It's been over a century since the first purpose-built gas station in the US opened in St. Louis, MO. So, assuming that electric cars beat the battery problem (and some other issues) keeping electric cars from competing effectively with gas-powered cars, what happens to gas stations? Here's some possibilities offered by Uncle Orson (Orson Scott Card):
- In a recent What's New Now mailing from PC Magazine, editor Dan Costa made an interesting point. If, in the not-so-distant future, most cars are electric, it might have some unexpected consequences -- because most electric car owners generally recharge their vehicles at home.
Now, that may be partly because there aren't a lot of quick-charge stations around town, and as long as you have enough juice to get home to where you invested in a quick-charge setup, it makes sense to power up the car at home.
That's because even quick charges aren't all that quick. It takes time for the inflowing electricity to make the chemical changes in the battery that will allow it to hold enough juice for the car to run for any serious length of time.
So if the home-charging trend continues to be true, that may have a drastic effect on something we all take for granted: the gas station convenience store.
Convenience stores originally had no gas pumps. There were probably laws against it. Seven-Eleven, the first convenience store I ever saw, really did open at seven in the morning and close at eleven at night. And while most gas stations sold candy and soda pop, they were all about cars -- convenience stores and gas stations had nothing to do with each other.
But once Seven-Eleven started putting a couple of pumps out front, and the other convenience stores followed suit, gas stations had to compete or die.
Nowadays, there are only a few full-function gas stations -- you know, the ones that are also serious garages, where they change tires, replace batteries, tune engines, replace brakes, and whatever else your car needs. They make their income from car care, and few of them bother with all the convenience store stuff.
There aren't many of those, compared to the huge number of gas station convenience stores. But could they live on their convenience store income alone?
If the only option for refueling your car is a 45-minute wait at a quick-charge station (and I'm dreaming to think of a full charge in that amount of time) or going home and recharging there, gas stations may be pretty much out of the gasoline business, except for the few dinosaurs still eking the last life out of the gas-guzzling vehicles.
How often do you head for the local gas/convenience store just for the convenience store stuff? With grocery stores and drugstores open way later than they used to be, most of us buy stuff at convenience stores only because we already stopped there for gas.
If we aren't buying gas, don't we just go to the supermarket or drugstore?
Of course, stopping by Walmart or Target or a big-box grocery store means hundreds of extra steps to get from the parking lot into the store, find your items, wait in line at the checkout, and then walk back to the car. Maybe we'll still want to stop at a convenience store and get what we want in thirty steps.
Or maybe service stations will go into the battery replacement business -- you drive in and a skilled mechanic-electrician swaps out your drained batteries for full ones of equal capacity. That would require standardization of battery form factors, probably mandated by the government. But it would allow service stations to refit and stay in business along with their convenience stores.
The many service stations that are also fast-food outlets would probably stay in business. I had dinner tonight in a McDonald's that's also a Citgo station and a pretty good convenience store. (If they don't have Naked fruit drinks or at least V-8, they don't qualify as excellent.) If the pumps weren't there, it would still be a McDonald's, so there'd probably be enough traffic to support the convenience store part.
But when we think about electric cars, it's easy to overlook that our lives right now are partly organized around buying gasoline. If we stop doing that, it's going to hurt or even destroy the gasoline infrastructure.
Today, there are gas stations pretty much everywhere except in the long stretches of desert highway out west. What if they were replaced by charging stations?
What about emergencies? I can imagine our tax dollars, which are now used to massively subsidize the petrol-powered automobile, being spent on a system of emergency charging stations built into telephone or power poles every half mile along the highway, so that if you run out of juice, you only have to push your car (or carry a recharge battery) only a quarter of a mile.
But let's get real. It will be a while before there's infrastructure in place that will allow us to have confidence in electric cars too far from home. Electric cars are much more convenient -- and trustworthy -- around town than on long trips.
So maybe we'll all rent petrol-fueled cars or vans for long trips (or fly, or take the train or the bus), and use our electric cars for local traffic only. It all depends on what our choices are, and where companies and governments invest their money. If you want to glimpse how that will work out, just look at the mish-mash of toll roads here in the eastern part of the U.S.
And there'll always be places like New Jersey, which charges tolls on the freeways that pass through the state -- and makes it nearly impossible to get off the freeway and choose an alternate route. Maybe electric cars on long-distance trips in New Jersey will be warned: "No electricity available off the freeway." That'll keep us from actually entering New Jersey, which seems to be the goal of their turnpike system.
It works, too, by the way. The only time I ever tried to drive on surface roads in New Jersey, admittedly in the days before GPS, we got hopelessly lost and ended up driving back to Pennsylvania to get on the Jersey toll road where we should have entered it in the first place.
(Since New Jersey was also the oppressive state that for years only allowed you to link your roaming cellphone to the company owned by some politician's uncle that had a monopoly on cellphone service, it is the place that we have to assume will always cause maximum pain and inconvenience to travelers. It's a tradition. The state animal of New Jersey is the apoplectic out-of-state driver.)
But one thing is certain: We can't predict right now all the ramifications of the conversion to electric cars.
Remember how CDs swept the recorded music business? Starting in the mid-1980s, I replaced all my vinyl with CDs. But only twenty years later, CDs were reduced to a small section of a few chain stores -- Barnes & Noble has CD sections most places (but not Greensboro), but other stores have dropped them.
Then there were laserdiscs. Aren't you glad you didn't pay for the expensive player and a bunch of LP-sized laserdiscs? Well, I did. Then DVDs came along within just a few years and wiped out the whole laserdisc scene.
Remember the 45 rpm record? Well, I'm old, so I do. I even remember when record players had to have a 78rpm setting because there were still people with the old heavy 78s -- which were album sized, but had only three or four minutes of music on a side.
That was what defined our idea of the "single" -- not the 45 rpm record! When radio stations finally got the legal right to play recordings on the air (it took an act of Congress and a lot of negotiation between publishers, radio stations, and songwriters' unions), that three-to-four-minute limit on 78s became so standard that even when 33 rpm records allowed individual songs to be pretty much any length, everything on the radio was built around the three-minute song. How could you fit in enough commercials in an hour if the songs were all six minutes long?
Long before MTV, we had already been trained to have a short attention span. We'd listen to a song on the radio -- and if we didn't like it, we knew it would be over soon and something better would be played next.
Every technological innovation has a lot of unintended consequences. Electric cars are far from being the only things coming down the pike that might massively change some aspect of the way we live. Nobody anticipated that the Internet would collapse a large portion of the broadcasting industry, destroy CDs, and effectively wipe out DVD sales only a few years after they came to dominate movie revenues.
Some pundits thought that tablets, beginning with the huge gold rush for iPads, would replace portable computers. Who imagined that mobile phones would keep the tablet craze in check -- while computers continued to be far more capable and convenient to enter data into than smartphones?
Yet ... texting! Who knew? Nobody, that's who.
Nobody guessed that one big-box retail giant, Walmart, would single-handedly destroy most American downtowns, especially in rural areas. And before you get all weepy, remember that Walmart accomplished this by offering better selections at lower prices, and downtowns died because we customers preferred to shop at Walmart, and the free market allowed us to make that choice.
But Walmart and other big box stores are possible only because of the huge subsidies that are given to the automotive industry. If each driver paid the real costs of driving on roads that go everywhere and having plenty of parking whenever they stop, cars wouldn't seem like such a convenience. I'm not against those subsidies; I'm only pointing out that every action, public or private, has consequences, and helps reshape the way we live.
Remember when long-distance services would advertise on television with their one-eight-hundred numbers? Gone gone gone (and I, for one, don't miss them).
Think about how brief each of these "revolutions" was, and you'll get some idea of how quickly after the invention of the gas station convenience store they might be wiped out by the next technological innovation.
Yeah, I'm a sci-fi writer, but I'm not going to make any predictions of my own, except the simple prediction that whatever happens, the people most affected by it won't be ready.
(Sci-fi writers are no better at predicting the future than anybody else. Isaac Asimov famously pointed out that when computers were the cutting edge of sci-fi in the 1950s and 1960s, nobody anticipated the miniaturization that transistors on printed circuit boards and then on silicon chips would allow. Everybody's stories had huge Walmart-sized buildings to house their most powerful computers.) (Of course, there were no Walmarts then to compare them to.)
So next time you stop in at the convenience store because heck, you had to fill up the tank anyway, look around and think: What if this went away?
Then again, look at the sign indicating where the restrooms are and keep in mind that we don't just stop our cars on long trips to fill a tank. Even with electric cars, we're still going to want clean restrooms, and if we're stopping for bladder renewal, the station owner might as well build a convenience store around that restroom.
In fact, I can imagine that to stay in business, former gas station convenience stores will start advertising their super-clean, luxurious toilet accommodations. "Stop here! We have full-width Cottonelle and Charmin toilet paper in every stall!"
Come on, admit it. If you knew that one gas station had regular toilet paper, like you use at home, and the others at that freeway exit only had the miserable skinny one-ply paper that barely works -- or simply fails -- which station would you stop at?
The clean, well-stocked, comfortable restroom wins every time with my family. When I used to drive to northern Virginia a lot, I knew every clean, comfortable restroom on US 29 between Greensboro and Gainesville, where you switch to I-66.
Now I maintain a similar mental roster of clean restrooms on US 220 from here to Roanoke. (I-81 goes so fast that once I'm on it, it's easier just to wait till I get to Lexington.)
So hey, if you own a service station convenience store, maybe the time to double the space you allot to restrooms is now. Get a designer to figure out how to design the restrooms so you have twice as much room for the women's as the men's, with maybe some entertainment options for waiting children, so they don't shoplift and vandalize their way around the store.
Use high-grade toilets with varying seat-heights. Make sure the sensor on automatic faucets can actually detect the presence of human hands, and have those supersonic hand driers that actually work instead of the loud ones that leave you to dry your hands on your clothes.
Then hire a couple of employees whose job is to check the restrooms constantly, replacing toilet paper rolls and refilling self-lathering soap containers -- and mopping, unclogging, and delittering as required. If you start thinking of your store as a luxury restroom complex surrounded by snack-centered shopping, you may get a head start on the competition.
Or you may find out, after spending half a million bucks on remodeling, that Uncle Orson was completely, absolutely wrong.
Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without.
—Edmund Burke
—Edmund Burke
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