DISHONEST GAS STATIONS

It is needless to say that buyers of any commodity in the market place should be concerned not only with the price they pay but equally with the quantity they get in return.  It is a bit strange, however, that this does not exactly hold true in the case of petroleum products.

I mean, even as some housewives are known to complain every now and then that they are not getting the right quantity of the LPG they buy in cylinders, we have yet to hear,  generally speaking, of motorists, much less the noisy jeep drivers in our midst and times, ever suspecting that they are being short-changed in the volume of the fuels they buy from gas stations.  But alas, there is reason to believe not all gas stations are honest in this regard.

I discovered this very coincidentally, anyway.  Sometime last month, I decided to burn the fallen leaves and twigs in my backyard. (I know there is what I think to be a stupid law or local ordinance prohibiting the burning of garbage, but that is an entirely different matter I may probably dwell on later.)  Realizing that the trash  I just swept into a mound was still moist from a previous rain,  I took an empty, 4-liter plastic container (the one used by bottlers of purified water) and walked to a nearby gas station to buy kerosine.  I read from the station's pump that a liter of kerosine then cost 47 pesos, so I reckoned that if I bought two hundred pesos worth of it, the container would just be full to the brim.  To my surprise, it was just slightly half full. But I just kept silent, knowing there's no use arguing with the gas tender.    Even as I did not wish to store too much kerosine at home, I went through the same process with two other gas stations the next couple of days thereafter. The respective volumes of the kerosine I got in each of the succeeding experiments were just about the same I got from the first gas station:  roughly 60% of the container's 4-liter tare capacity.

I know  that the Department of Energy requires  regular calibration of the meters of all gas stations.  As a matter of fact, the oil companies, particularly the Big Three, do maintain so-called Sales Reps, whose primary function is to ensure the accuracy of their respective gas stations' pumps and meters.  But then we are not born yesterday not to know that which apparently happens just after those calibration schedules.
Notwithstanding this unfortunate finding, I dare not reveal the identity of the suspicious gas stations.  Suffice it for me to know that I know at least three gas stations who can't be relied upon, and for me to warn my own children and a few close friends who have vehicles never again to patronize these stations.   I now leave it to the readers to try my very simple experiment and to be guided accordingly..   .