That Went by Fast by Frank White

Author:Frank White
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781550176698
Publisher: Harbour Publishing Co. Ltd.
Published: 2014-10-25T00:00:00+00:00

Pender Harbour Chevron, the gas station Kay and I built at the corner of Francis Peninsula Road and Highway 101. People said it looked good enough to be a private home and in the end it became one.

We were glad to see credit cards come in because that got us away from carrying credit ourselves to a degree, but we lost a lot of money there, too. Chevron put out a list of cards that had been revoked each week and you were supposed to check every card you took in to see if it was on this list. Well, the list was about six feet long and in type so small you needed a magnifying glass to read it and when you got busy there was just no way you could do it. As a result, we began to get a steady stream of charges that had been rejected at head office, and that went against our account.

We still couldn’t stop giving our own credit because most of our customers didn’t have good enough credit to get credit cards. Cutting anybody’s credit off was a drastic measure that courted a feud with their whole extended family, and many of the big interconnected families we had first run afoul of in the logging camp were still going strong. Besides, we had competition, and they gave credit.

My old nemesis, Haywire Harper had built a b/a gas station next to the school in downtown Madeira Park and put his daughter Bev and son-in-law Johnny Divall in to run it. I am sure they had exactly the same trouble with credit we did, with the same people, but that didn’t stop the culprits from playing us off against each other. If we’d ever sat down over a beer and agreed to both stop giving credit our lives would have been a lot easier, but we were not on speaking terms. When you go into business in a small town, the degree of animosity you build up for your competition puts the Orangemen and the Catholics to shame. You start dividing the town up into those that buy the other guy’s gas (infidels, unwashed) and those that buy yours (the saved, the chosen people). You have to laugh looking back, but at the time it was deadly serious stuff.

The real problem with the gas station was the gas company. They allowed you just enough profit to barely survive on. At that time we were selling gas for about forty cents a gallon. Litres hadn’t been invented then, but if they had it would have been something like ten cents a litre. For selling the gas we got about three cents out of the forty. So every time some sob skipped town and left us on the hook for ten gallons, we would have to sell 120 gallons to make it up.

The gas company controlled prices absolutely. The office in Vancouver would order a hike but we wouldn’t know about it until the local bulk agent, Gerry MacDonald, delivered his next load and sprung it on us.

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