Motorists at a Wilmington, N.C., gas station spent nine hours filling up on gas that was priced at 35 cents a gallon last week after a clerk’s error accidentally changed the pump price from $3.35 to 35 cents, The Charlotte Observer reported.
Charlotte Observer columnist Tommy Tomlinson berated motorists in the Atlantic Coast town of Wilmington for their collective decision to fill up on the ultra-cheap fuel without telling the clerks they’d made a mistake.
Tomlinson said a clerk at a BP station in Wilmington accidentally left off a digit when the gas price was entered in the computer at about 9 a.m. on Friday.
“By 6 p.m., lines were so long that traffic was backed up out in the street,” Tomlinson wrote. “That’s when clerks at the store figured out what was going on.”
For the entire nine hours, not a single customer said a word about the store’s mispriced fuel. Motorists heard about it from other motorists, and people spent the day using their credit cards to fill up on gas.
“It’s possible that some people thought the station was trying a stunt to draw business, even though the price wasn’t advertised,” Tomlinson wrote. “But that silence inside the store tells the story. Some of those people had to have known that the store had messed up. Some of them knew that, in a real sense, they were stealing.”
