[jopsen]

When you can pay with card at the pump, the only remaining users for "pay inside" are thieves and the occasional cash-only customer.

Also no surprise they don't want you to pay cash, that means dealing with cash which is expensive.

Employees at the gas station could spend their time selling hot dogs instead :)

[mminer237]

Most of the stations around me actually offer a cash discount. When you're dealing with a single-digit margin, that 2.5% CC fee looks pretty tempting. More are trying to push their station cards now though.

[kolinko]

Or people from Europe. It’s 50/50 whether an automated station will accept my European card - can’t figure out the pattern there

[vinay427]

In my experience this seems to be much less of a problem now with contactless payments, in both directions. US cards that used to require swipe-and-signature or chip-and-signature instead of chip-and-PIN seem to just work in when tapping (at least in the 3-4 countries I’ve traveled in extensively, although contactless isn’t widely accepted in some countries) and cards from a few European countries seem to work with contactless which is finally increasingly widely adopted in the US.

[jimmux]

Back around 2008, I recall having problems because my Australian cards would be prompted for a 5-digit zip code. It only happened at gas stations for some reason. The closest we have is 4-digit postcodes, which it wouldn't accept. Eventually, I figured out I could prepend a 0, but I didn't want to trial-and-error that unless it set off a fraud flag with my bank. Probably a good thing it was pre-pay in the cases that didn't work.