Seriously, Jersey girls: Are you THAT against pumping your own gas?

At a town hall meeting yesterday, someone asked the governor about lifting the ridiculous ban on self-serve gas.

Somehow New Jerseyans are okay with self-serve postage machines in lobbies of post offices, self-serve scanners at grocery stores and convenience stores, self-serve ordering kiosks at QuickChek, self-serve car washes, self-serve Red Boxes for movie rentals, self-service atms, even self-service frozen yogurt shops.

But gas? (Insert shuddering sounds here.)

The governor's answer was that allowing self-serve gas makes sense from a public policy perspective but that no one will vote for it. Why would the politicians in Trenton not vote for it? Apparently they're afraid of losing the female vote.

The governor went on to explain, "The last private poll we did on this question, 78 percent of New Jersey women said they were opposed to self-serve gas."

I have a hard time believing that 78 percent of New Jersey women are opposed to what women in the rest of the nation embrace. Especially busy women, and it's hard to find a woman busier than a Jersey girl. Do busy women here really like wasting all that collective time year in year out waiting in line because orange cones have half the pumps blocked off, waiting for one attendant to finish with two other cars before finally taking the nozzle back out of theirs so they can move on with their day?

I'd like to know demographically who these women were in his survey. If they were all over 60 I get it. But busy, working moms with careers and responsibilities and time constraints shouldn't think of wasting time as a luxury.

— Jeff Deminski

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