Matt miguel, an attendant at an Astro gas station in Southeast Portland,
is ambivalent and a bit confused about Oregon’s inchoate new laws around pumping. “I think it is weird,” he says. “You know, basically the rest of the world can pump their own gas.”

Since August, Oregon’s urban gas stations have been allowed—though not required—to offer self-service gas, at up to half of their pumps. An attendant’s presence is required. There’s more: in rural counties, all-self-serve (no attendant) is still legal; also, if you drive a motorcycle, diesel vehicle, or aircraft, you’re free to pump for yourself in every county. 

Miguel preferred the old way. “I think it just made us quirky,” he says. “It’s how we always have been.” He recently transferred to the job security of a graveyard shift, 11 p.m. to 6:30 a.m., following summer staffing cuts at an Astro in West Linn. Since the law changed, he’s seen mishaps, like customers pumping diesel into their gasoline cars—a costly mistake that clogs the engine and requires towing. (He says that the diesel nozzle, which is purposely designed to be wider, fits into some nondiesel Toyotas.) 

He has also seen how Portlanders navigate self-pump versus full service. Older folks and those with disabilities, he says, are more likely to stay in their cars and wait for service. But mostly, he’s noticed that customers want convenience: “When it was super hot, everybody wanted to pump their own gas,” rather than wait in a sweltering, turned-off car. “When it started raining real bad, nobody wanted to pump their own gas.” 

Attendants are finding, counterintuitively, that self-service has made their role indispensable. “No matter what, you still need a gas attendant,” says Jake Harris, a pump worker at a 76 in Southeast Portland. “A lot of people don’t know what they’re doing, of course, because they’re from Oregon.” Harris took the position a year ago, which allowed him to retire from recycling cans, his job for the previous six years. He’s befuddled by the new legislation. “Most people have no idea why [the law changed],” he says, “and I don’t either.”

More changes may be coming. Unions such as UFCW Local 555, which represents some employees at Safeway and Fred Meyer groceries, are organizing to roll back the change, arguing that it removes jobs from the community. Yet, statistically, it’s a job few seem to want. In 2017, Oregon was in need of 200 attendants, according to state employment figures. By 2022, that number was 596, with 93 percent of the positions considered, uh, difficult to fill, according to employers. “No one wants to work at a gas station,” wrote a station owner on a recent employment department survey.  

Meanwhile, the dimensions of the role have multiplied and now include a psychological component: attendants must ascertain whether customers want or need help. Plus, an educational angle. “This is not as easy as most of ’em think it is,” Derris Parhm noted recently during his shift at a 76 in North Portland. Customers, he says, don’t know that when the machine asks for the “amount” they should just hit the enter button if they want to fill the tank (unless, say, precisely $10 of gas is wanted). “We’ve got to show ’em where to put the card in, what you need to press, whether you want a receipt, how to put the nozzle in, and how to start it and everything,” he says. Pumps and their user interfaces differ from station to station. And customers are uninterested in learning. “They mainly just sit there,” Parhm says. “They like, ‘I don’t want to deal with it. Y’all go ahead and do it.’ And that’s how it is.”

Our interview is interrupted when a young man approaches Parhm to ask for a rag because he’s spilled some gas on his hand while filling his Jetta. Parhm says his days are filled with this mild crisis management. One customer lost control of the nozzle. “It just went all inside her car,” he remembers with a half smile. “Oh, yeah. Right up on pump two, it happened.”

Overall, Parhm likes his job. He makes the same money as he did
previously at Subaru and doesn’t have to work at a warehouse or worry about bringing COVID home to his daughters. He gets his steps in, chats up regular customers, and gets “a little tip here and there, you know, once in a while,” he says. “It’s a beautiful thing.”