California Gas Station Sold Fuel at $0.69 per Gallon by Mistake
Photo: Patrick T. Fallon/AFP (Getty Images)
In April, a gas station in Chattanooga, Tennessee accidentally sold fuel at 45 cents per gallon. I genuinely thought this would be a rare oddity and would happen again, especially as gas prices in the U.S. are soaring to historic highs. However, a Northern California gas station made the same error earlier this week.
A Shell station in Rancho Cordova, California sold gas at 69 cents per gallon. Nice! Like in Tennessee, the pricing error was caused by a misplaced decimal point. The intended price was $6.99 per gallon. Several customers and nearby residents shared the glitch on social media. Most notably, Darryl Surita of nearby Sacramento shared a video of himself filling up his car on Instagram. He captioned the post, “We got to fight these gas prices some how 69 cents a gallon I am loving this!” Surita told Newsweek:
“I posted [this] on my Instagram and replied to anyone who messaged me. I called my mom and told her, and called my brother and told him too. I thought it was too good to be true until I checked the gas meter in the car and it was full, but I only spent 14 dollars. I filled my car up, left, came back with a second car, filled it up, then left again and came back with my cousin and filled up 150 gallons of a 500-gallon tank. The whole gas station was filled with cars and people with extra gas cans.”
It took three hours for station management to resolve the error. Currently, the average price for a gallon of gasoline in California is $6.434. The cost of gas nationwide is only expected to increase as the summer goes on, but at least a few people got a bit of relief for a fill-up.
