After coming in from an Uber run this past weekend between Kingston and New Paltz this past weekend, I stopped in here. I never imagined much, but having had riders who were planning to take themselves to a party at an industrial plant near the Residence Inn, I knew I needed gas, but was so planning to see other stations besides the Shell and Speedway stations in/near New Paltz, saw this and fell in love at first sight. I saw the temperature was getting cold, but never thought more than enough times that -1 degree Fahrenheit was really cold to try and pump.
When I saw that there were no cars, I thought nothing of the temperature and decided to pump gas with my GasBuddy card at a Pay-at-the-Pump transaction. (more (side note) on this momentarily).
I got out of my vehicle and thought about the feeling of being warm in the -1 degree Temperature (try to think positive when it's impossible in this life) and proceeded over to use the terminal.
When I got there, my first notice was the contactless reader on the gas terminal itself: first time I've seen an Apple Pay contactless reader on gas pumps, and boy...if the GasBuddy card would've had that functionality I would've chosen it for ease of use. But I had to insert the card because it didn't have this functionality with it. (/me is annoyed: IRC terminology for "I am annoyed at the situation.")
Upon beginning to pump, I was requested to watch a video on the TV monitor. It displayed an ESPN program from that days' airings, and although I don't mind sports news, I know that not everyone is happy to see this type of news at the pumps. But I didn't like was what followed the short 1 minute snippet of sports news: the weather. I knew quite a bit about the weather and seeing the upcoming predictions for that night's lows really made it uncomfortable to stand there. I saw it was supposed to get snippy cold (down to -8 degrees Fahrenheit) where to a point, all I wanted to do was finish up the fill-up and head back to my car, not stopping later for my receipt.
If you want to keep your customers, don't pressure your customers to watch this type of information the moment they begin to pump their gas. Perhaps that's the reason why no one was around, and no other cars were present filling up and such. read more