Lots of good points in this thread - having run a compressor on a remote island in Alaska, 780 miles away by plane from the nearest other dive shop - I certainly understand the economics of the situation! Amigos is also a pretty nifty system - saw that when I was down in Florida in April for cavern training. Love the infrastructure you guys have in place down there!
It's not so much about the price, but more about the policies. The old price of $.175 per CF is fair in our market. It would cost me $.09 per CF to do it myself, and I don't have to pay for labor or the overhead of a storefront. But if you're going to charge by the CF - you MUST have a way for your customers to confirm the CF that you filled. There needs to be a gauge, accessible to the customers, that allows them to check their in and out pressures and make certain that they were charged correctly and are leaving with a fill at their desired pressure. The very absence of that ability at our local shop is the source of this entire issue.
It's like going to fill your truck at the gas station, and not having the price per gallon or gallons filled displayed. When you're done, it just says "$61.25" and the attendant asks for your credit card. You ask the attendant how much the fuel costs, and he just looks at you blankly and says "$61.25". You ask how he came up with that number and are told it was sold by the gallon, but when you ask how much the price per gallon is, and he responds "Well, the pump does the math." If you push him for an answer, his response is that the Geo Metro in front of you has a 12.5 gallon fuel tank, and to fill it from empty to full is $35. Okay... you do the math yourself and come up with $2.80 a gallon. You must have purchased 21.875 gallons to fill up; yet when you climb in your vehicle the needle displays only 7/8ths full, and you were 1/8th full when you arrived. 21.875 gallons added to your 1/8th tank should have put you at full. The attendant insists that he filled your truck all the way, and that your fuel gauge must be wrong. You have no way of verifying the gallons dispensed yourself and are told that their pump's gauge is accurate and that's the only gauge they go off of. Your friends also tell you they have the same experiences at this gas station.
The gas stations owner gets annoyed with the truck drivers asking him to prove how many gallons he pumped, and decides to just go to a flat rate system. It's now $35 to fill up the car to 12.5 gallons; but $70 to put any quantity of fuel in the truck. If the truck driver only wants 10 gallons - it's $70. He's now seen his prices increase from $2.80 a gallon to $7 a gallon.
None of us would tolerate that at the gas pump; but somehow we're jerks for asking the dive shop to come up with a better system?
Another implication - what's the truck driver going to do in response? Probably coast around on fumes and ride the gauge on empty so that he can make sure he gets the maximum value from his fill-up. That has some serious safety implications if we were to start encouraging it in the dive community with stupid policies like this one.
This started over a Facebook post where a diver posted a 2900PSI pressure reading on a fill that had been sold as a 3400PSI fill, and it rapidly went downhill from there. I would very strongly recommend not friending shop owners or employees on Facebook - it's not worth the headache or drama.
-B