Every so often a little story says something big. Here's one about cheap gas in Wilmington.
Friday morning, according to news reports, an attendant set the prices on the gas pumps at a BP station on 17th Street. Premium was supposed to be $3.35 a gallon. The attendant accidentally left off a digit. So the price at the pump was 35 cents.
This happened at 9 in the morning. By 6 p.m., lines were so long that traffic was backed up out in the street. That's when clerks at the store figured out what was going on.
OK, maybe the clerks were a little slow on the uptake.
But here's the thing: In that whole nine hours, not one customer said a word about it in the store.
Nobody asked if the pump was wrong. Nobody wondered why high-test was cheap and regular was the usual price. Nobody thanked the employees for putting gas on sale.
Nine hours.
People were talking about it, to be sure: One woman told the Wilmington Star-News that her baby-sitter tipped her off. Another woman said a stranger told her about it in a shopping center parking lot.
When they got to the gas station, people just swiped their credit cards and filled up and got out of there.
It's possible that some people thought the station was trying a stunt to draw business, even though the price wasn't advertised.
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.
The question is, did they feel guilty? Or more to the point: Should they have felt guilty?
It's not a bad question for a Sunday morning.
As a consumer, sometimes you can't help feeling that businesses try to rip you off every time you turn around. It hurts even worse for expenses you can't do much about. That's why so many people are furious at the city of Charlotte for threatening to raise water rates in a drought: They get you if you use a lot of water, they get you if you don't.
Gas is one of those expenses. Now it takes 50 bucks to fill up my old Toyota. Most of us drive more than we ought to. But a lot of people have jobs where they can't take the bus or the train to work every day. And so oil companies rake in the biggest profits in human history.
In a way it must have been a thrill to see 35 cents flashing on that pump -- finally, a chance to stick it to the Man.
But here's the question for you: If you had come upon that 35-cent gas, and you knew something was wrong, would you still have filled up? And if so, why?
In a weak moment, I might have done it. If I had been close to broke, probably so. You can come up with your own reason that looks good on paper.
But what really matters is how it feels when you try to sleep at night.
And that's when some people in Wilmington will discover that even cheap stuff can come with a hidden price.
IN MY OPINION Tommy Tomlinson
