Conoco and Sinclair brands are still both alive and well in Mo, KS, CO, UT areas. The Sinclair refinery in Sinclair, WY is still open.
Marnet: the “V” gas brand you may be thinking of is Vickers. They were headquartered in Wichita, as I recall. Used their fuels in the KS/western Mo areas in the 1960’s through the 1980’s.
In the Kansas City area, the Vickers stations were sold and later branded Total, DiamondShamrock and now Valero. Many of them are still selling gasoline.
Vickers. Yes, that was it! Thank you jayhawkroy. 
Oil copanies in my area of east central Indiana were really dirty to the independents. My parents traded at a little store that sold groceries and gasoline. The owned and his family lived in an apartment attached to the store. The store originally handled Gulf gasoline and oil. Gulf changed the price on gasoline without telling the owned. The owner lost a penny on each gallon of gasoline. The owner’s wife handled the business and told the Gulf distributor if it happened again, Gulf could come and pump out the gasoline from the underground tanks and pull the pumps. It did happen again and she forced Gulf to pump out the gas and remove the pumps. Now this station pumped a lot of gasoline as it has a great location. The owner became a Shell distributor. After a couple of years, Shell pulled the same stunt, so the owned signed on with Standard Oil.
Ultimately, the owned sold out to Marathon and Marathon erected a full service station on the corner. The existing structure was torn down and the station was leased to another person. The station had a big repair business and had two wreckers on 24 hour call. This business went on until the mid 1990s when Marathon didn’t renew the lease, tore down the structure it built in the mid 1960s and replaced it with a business similar to 7-11 called Village Pantry. This is back where things were in the 1940s through the mid 1960s except that the independent businessowner is out of the loop.
I have heard that the oil companies conspired to divide up the nation into territories. Gulf oil left our area as did Texaco. Marathon became big. We used to have many brands. Now, the same tanker truck fills the tanks at all the stations. I’ve heard that there is a different additive pa kage added depending on whether the station is a,Marathon, She’ll, Speedway, Phillips 66 etc. but I haven’t noticed any difference in my vehicles no matter what brand I buy.
…and they are becoming even bigger, as a result of buying all of Hess’s gas stations in the Northeast/Mid-Atlantic regions. The Marathon signs have not yet been erected, but pretty soon this company will be a presence in the Northeast/Mid-Atlantic, as well as in their traditional operating area in the mid-west.
What has really disappeared besides some of those brands is the whole concept of a service station. You used to buy gas at a full service station that had a couple of service bays. They sold fan belts, oil, filters, and sometimes they had a coke machine, sold candy bars, and a cigarette vending machine.
Now it’s all self service pumps in front of a convenience store that sells beer, chips, and soda.
One of the original Sinclair stations in my old home town is now a Subway sandwich shop.
The closest gas station to my house is a Shell station that is just as you described, and I do use it occasionally, especially if I am just filling a jerry can for my outdoor equipment. However, as a general rule I drive 5 miles further to Costco, where the gas is significantly cheaper. Currently, Costco’s top-tier regular is selling for 24 cents per gallon less than what the guy at the old-fashioned Shell station charges.
He is not likely to go out of business, as he has a very active maintenance & repair business and he has the contract to repair the local postal vehicles. The presence of 4 nearby retirement communities virtually guarantees him a steady flow of maintenance and repair + gas customers, so even if I buy gas from him only on rare occasions, he is likely to continue to thrive.
We had Sinclair and Arco in Western NY many years ago but now the closest ones to us areuver 500 miles away in Illinois.
Got me thinking. I think there might be a Sinclair station here yet. I’ll have to look next time I go to the yard waste sight. It also has a repair bay. The guy was a foreman at a plant I worked at a couple summers and his dream was to quit being a foreman and own a car repair shop. Of course the plant closed and he had the shop at least for a while. Maybe his kids do now.
We have abandoned, boarded up service stations all over my area. Most gasoline is sold at convenience stores. Some of the proprietors that leased the facilities from the oil companies managed to buy the property and pulled the pumps. One thing that keeps the properties from selling is that the gas tanks have to be removed if they are the old steel tanks, and.if there has been leakage, an.expensive cleanup must be done.
They must have pretty tight regs on tank removal in TX - as soon as I see a station shut down, the tanks are out.
@texases, who pays for tank removal? There is a defunct gas station near me that has been shut down for about 10 years. No one is willing to use it for something else because they would have to pay for tank removal before undertaking anything else. That high up front cost stops any repurposing of the property.
Well around here its the last owner that gets caught with the hot potato. Got a friend that had a store converted from an old station maybe 50 years ago and the tanks were never pulled. They didn’t have to be then. Sold his store and converted to an office building and leased. They want to buy and he wants to sell but its big bucks doing the core samples to determine leakage etc. and what clean up would have to be done. Of course any soil contaminated is a hazardous waste. So woe to anyone that buys a former station unless its already been cleansed. You can easily spend a year or two worth of lease payments on the clean-up just to be able to sell it again.
Then down the road a bit is a guy that just disappeared with the store shut and the tanks still in the ground. Couldn’t even find him to have the old sign changed and the city had to pay for it. So the city will end up owning the property and pulling the tanks. Must be a better way.
Eastern MA/NH Hess stations have been converted to Speedway. I liked Hess, they tended to have best prices. Since they sold out, the Speedways are closer to the median price in this area.
What has really disappeared besides some of those brands is the whole concept of a service station
We have abandoned, boarded up service stations all over my area.
We’ve all witnessed this. Why has it happened?
- Does it have to do more with the oil companies not wanting service bays on their property?
- Or because there’s more money to be made selling soda, cigarettes, junk food, and lottery tickets than servicing cars?
- Or because cars are more reliable now so fewer repair shops are needed?
If there was money to be made in full service stations (like there was yesteryear), they would still exist.
The transition from service stations to convenience stores seemed to begin during the 1970’s. Probably due to all of the above.
One of the more unusual gas stops is in La Grange, TX, yes that La Grange that ZZ Top sang a song about. You fill gas outside and when you go inside, you find yourself in a Czech bakery selling fresh breads, kalaches, rolls, pastries, etc bake right on the premises. The place has actually become a destination stop for people traveling down Highway 71.
@Bing, what happens if the previous owner declares bankruptcy? If they go out of business, bankruptcy can’t be far away. It seems like these clean-up fees would guarantee bankruptcy.
A friend of mine bought a dormant Amoco station on the condition that HE would not be responsible for removing the tanks. The state government paid the bill.
That same station had a long canopy that covered four sets of double pumps, side by side, a couple of years before my friend bought it. One day a crew arrived and took down the canopy. They hauled it all off on a semi truck. The local “weakly” paper had pictures on the front page. No one asked who they were or who they were working for. It was not Amoco. In short, it was stolen, and never found. One of the crew even went down the street and got a haircut. The barber is a retired police officer. No questions were asked, no answers given. It proves the old adage, if you want to steal something in broad daylight, just act like you know what you’re doing.
The headquarters of Sinclair Oil were in Independence KS for many years. The Sinclair “mansion” was on the market, but did not sell from this listing. http://www.zillow.com/homes/77251862_zpid/?hdpRedirected=true&3col=true Mr Sinclair moved south to Tulsa when its oil boom hit in the '20s.
Sinclair sold out to Atlantic Richfield, so some of their stations were renamed ARCO. The Sinclair station in my home town was razed to become a bank well before that sale.
Conoco and Phillips Petroleum merged as stated earlier. There are stations of both brands in this area. For some reason, the Phillips stations are usually a couple of cents higher priced than the Conoco Stations. Since their main refineries are only about 70 miles apart, that makes little sense to me.
Like I said, I’ve been told if you want to steal something don’t lurk in the dark but go to the car under the street light. No one will notice. Kinda like the car honking at Walmart and everyone just walks by.
JT, well in a bankruptcy, it would depend on the judge and the lien holders on the property if any. A lien holder wouldn’t have to foreclose on the place and just leave it with the original owner. Also a judge could view it as a liability and wouldn’t have to order it sold. So bankruptcy is no guarantee of being able to unload it.
Now if you just walked away, eventually the county would have to take it for a tax foreclosure but a sharp County Administrator may decide its not worth it and not take it for the county either. I suppose that could be seen as malfeasance though since it would be his job to foreclose. Most likely though the county would just take it over and demo it so as not to create an eyesore and sell the property for redevelopment after paying to clean it up. Unless the county were destitute.
Back in the 1960s I noticed in my community that the leased service stations turned over to a different lessee every two or three years. Some of them moved to a station for lease in a better location. Others, including a,mechanic that maintained my car and had moved from a Standard station in one location to a Standard station in another location and then to a newly built Gulf station. He was a great mechanic, but gave up on leasing service stations and went to work for a company servicing and installing overhead garage doors. In fact, he installed the garage door on a new house I had built. He told me when he installed the garage door that the service station business was not an easy way to earn a living.
We had another top flight mechanic that leased a station from Sunoco. When the lease was up, Sunoco tried to rewrite the lease so that it would get a big cut of the. Inside business. He balked and built his own shop where he was quite successful. Nobody else would lease the station and it was eventually torn down. Several different businesses have been built on that location since that time.
@Bing, there is no guarantee in the circumstance you describe that the bankrupt owner would have to remove the tanks. The property just sits ther forever in its present state.