Screwed At The Gas Station

So I patronize a certain franchise of gas station.  I did that about a year or so ago because they began to offer double coupon Tuesdays, where the discount on the coupon counts twice as much on that day.  Moreover, they honor any competitor's coupon, so why go anywhere else?

(I signed up for the loyalty card, too, and recently they began a program -- which hopefully is permanent -- where they knock off an extra three cents a gallon.  I hear that other, national places like Shell and Chevron have gas that actually does stuff like clean your fuel injectors.  I thought that was bullshit, but I've heard on the Internet that there might actually be something to that.  At any rate, the discount I get on gas is too much for me to pass up, although I might try a flyer once in a while to see if it makes a difference.  But I digress. ...)

The one issue that always comes up, however, is actually calculating the total discount.  While you get so many cents off per gallon, you rarely get a round number of gallons.  So what happens if your tank is full, at, say, 13.78 gallons?  I think that's how much I put into my tank just about an hour ago at the gas station near my house that I frequent.

I had a ten-cent-off coupon.  It's Tuesday.  Also, I am a member, therefore I get an extra three cents off.  The gas these days is $3.09 (that's one good thing about the winter: Lower gas prices), so with all of that I should fill up at $2.86/gal.

Unfortunately, the people working at gas stations aren't math whizzes, otherwise they wouldn't be working at gas stations.  The person who took my card and coupon is someone I haven't ever seen before.  She takes her glasses, looks at the coupon, looks at the 13.78 gallons I took ... and manually punches in a discount of $2.60.  This is before the membership discount, which is automatically taken off when my card is scanned, so I'll give her that.  But she was too damn lazy to just walk over to their accounting machine which is right next to the outside microphone (I know it's there, I've seen  more professional clerks use it) and punch in 13.78*.2.  That .78 gallons she choose not to discount for me meant that I paid 15.6 cents more than I should have.  And now I can't get that pretzel dog from Auntie Anne's that I wanted.

This has happened a few times before, but this time I kind of went over the edge.  I didn't yell or anything; I indicated my displeasure at her refusal to do all the math by throwing my credit card at her.  Well, not at her face or anything; she reached out her hand and I just tossed it around there.  She was listening to the chatter with the people lining up with the other clerks, so her not totally paying attention also kind of got to me.

She didn't say anything ... until she said, "Thank you, have a nice day."  Gah!  Now I feel guilty for being so rude.  I didn't look at her while I was folding my receipt, but I did say, "Thank you" and left.  OK, so maybe she didn't know.  And now I feel both guilty and burned for being stiffed on my proper discount.  Two contradictory feelings, but I feel them both at the same time, now.

Seriously, this gas station needs to make a hard and fast rule on what to do with fractions on fill-ups.  Make them use the calculator.  Maybe even say you round down, that's fine.  Just be fucking consistent, please!