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And while she’s still pretty new – she’s been a cashier at Victoria’s Cimarron Junction convenience store for about a month – she helps keep the place running smoothly.
“Since I’ve been here, there hasn’t been a drive-off,” she said, glancing outside, where several customers were fueling up.
Gas drive-offs, or cases where people pump gasoline and leave without paying, typically go up whenever fuel prices do, said Jeff Lenard, a spokesman with the National Association of Convenience Stores.
He sees an increase every spring, he said, which probably comes because people get angry when they see prices rise.
They look for an outlet for their anger, he said, and they often take that anger out on retailers.
The average retailer, however, only makes about one and-a-half cents per gallon of gas, or about $60 a day, he said.
“They don’t make the big bucks,” Lenard said. “When somebody drives away with $60 of gas, that’s a day’s worth of profit.”
It’s difficult to determine exactly whether drive-offs are increasing locally, said Lt. Mike Hernandez with the Victoria Police Department.
The police department received word of 618 drive-offs between January and May, he said, but only about 22 percent of those reports came back to the police department.
“They call and get an incident number and we don’t get a report back,” he said.
Of the 618 incident numbers dispensed, 158 of those resulted in offense reports, according to police department records. That’s up from the 92 offense reports for the same period last year.
That disconnect between numbers dispersed and offense reports issued could be due to several things, Hernandez said. They might be busy or it could be due to what he called “internal problems.”
He said he’s spoken with a local loss prevention professional who believes much of the gasoline is “walking out the door,” but said he couldn’t prove that.
Detective Eddie Stevens with the Victoria Police Department said he handles at least two drive-off cases a week because, with the higher gas prices, it pushes more cases up to class B misdemeanor thefts, or thefts of between $50 and $500.
“Now that gas is so high, it doesn’t take much to get $50 worth of gas,” Stevens said.
A class B theft can carry a fine of up to $2,000 and/or up to 180 days in jail, he said.
The success rate isn’t 100 percent when it comes to identifying offenders, Hernandez said.
Between October 2001 and June 2007, only about 11 percent of drive-off cases resulted in identifying the offender, he said, noting that 5 percent of cases were cleared by arrest and 6 percent were “exceptionally cleared,” where the offender was identified and then paid for the fuel.
Stevens suggested stations require people to pay for their gas before pumping to cut down on the problem.
While Lenard admitted that would almost completely eliminate the problem, he said requiring prepays opens up its own issues.
Some customers begin to feel that the station managers don’t trust them, he said, and stop pumping gas there.
Stations tend to make less money, he said, because people underestimate the amount of gas they need to fill up and then don’t want to go in to pay again.
People also purchase fewer items inside the stores when forced to prepay.
“It makes convenience stores less convenient,” Lenard said.
Victoria’s Fast Stop convenience stores don’t mandate prepay, but they have several security measures in place, store supervisor Vernon Green said..
Clerks aren’t supposed to turn on a pump until they know who’s out there, he said, and after dark the person must prepay.
Depending on the station and the layout of the gas pumps, clerks jot down license plate numbers just in case.
“On our drive-offs, we prosecute them with the police department,” he said. “We have signs on all of our pumps and they know if they get caught that we’re not going to back off of it.”
Fast Stop doesn’t see a tremendous amount of drive-offs, but they do happen, Green said, noting they’re most common at night.
“When gas is up close to $4 a gallon you have more than when it’s $2,” he said. “The higher the gas, the more you have.”
Cimarron Junction, however, began requiring prepayment about three months ago, Ortiz said, and some customers get frustrated with the process.
“We explain why we do it,” she said, noting that some of the store’s regular customers will simply wave for clerks to activate their pump.
The station has surveillance cameras, she said, but employees will sometimes jot down customers’ license plate numbers just to be safe.
“With gas prices up,” she said, “you have to.”
Allison Miles is a reporter for the Advocate. Contact her at 361-580-6511 or amiles@vicad.com.