I'm boycotting Valero because of it. None of the gas stations around me seem to do it, it's just them. So fuck them.
this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2025
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Mildly Infuriating
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The button second from the top on the right hand side of the screen is the mute button(usually).
If not, try all of them, one usually mutes it. If not, hold the top two for ten seconds to force the pump into maintenance mode, gas pumps as normal, then times out eventually to the main screen.
Most of them in my area have disabled that. There is no non-destructive way to mute them.
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If I can't mute them (usually one of the unlabeled buttons on the right), I'll go to another station. I really hate those. God damn Cheddar TV or whatever. Fucking Maria Menounos, ugh.
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They're loud as hell too. Makes me want to put a shishkabob skewer through either my eardrum or the speaker. That my be an exaggeration, but I'm not exaggerating when I say that I actively the avoid gas stations in my city that have this "feature".
The buttons around the screen should mute it. It's usually the 3rd one down on the right of the screen. You can also use the lower ADA buttons.
Many have been updated to make them unmuteable.
The auxiliary mute button is accessed by puncturing the speaker cone.
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Second button from the top on the right will mute the ad.
This works on most I've encountered, but not all. New gas station near me built less than 2 years ago has no mute button, and the ads play 24/7 whether someone is there or not. If you are pumping gas late at night with nobody else around you get to hear 10 pumps all blaring ads to nobody and each milliseconds out of sync. It's totally fucked.
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In my neck of the woods, gas station owners have sharpies which of the 10 buttons is the mute button.
So as soon as the ad plays you just press mute.
It is God awful though.
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I'm from Washington and occasionally drive in Oregon, which is one of those states.
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welcome to like ten years ago?
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yes it's awful. Everything is awful.
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you can mute them or turn down their volumes. The buttons are there so you can press them.
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if it's not on the pump: yeah that's truly evil.
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late stage capitalism, in some cases, is still capitalism. You could tell the station worker or owner you don't like that and it's bad. But good luck with them not spitting in your face in return.
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do you live under a rock? Are you so isolated somehow that the GAS STATION is your only exposure to this bullshit? Tell me your secrets, I need that level of peace in my life.
I kinda set a no ads tolerance policy for myself. I pay for some services (e.g. $5/month for Nebula, I donate monthly to Lemmy, etc). YouTube is the main area where ads tend to creep in since iOS doesn’t have an ad blocker for YT. My goal was to totally ditch YouTube for Nebula, but they are missing some creators I like.
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Protip: moving to a place where it takes effort to understand the language turns ads into a dadaist experience.
Almost two decades ago, I worked at a network service provider who had as a customer a company that provided the technology for serving those gas pump ads.
At each gas station they had a VSAT, a router and of course the digital signage boxes on each pump.
They fed the ads to thousands of pumps via a single T1 to HughesNet in Atlanta. They'd multicast the ads, and have a local cache at each pump that would receive the stream, cache it and serve it.
It was one of the most elegant setups I've ever seen, and should serve as a case study in multicast for efficient bandwidth utilization across an expensive data transmission medium.
Never understood this. Sincerely hope that any place trying out here is shunned.
EVs will hopefully put the tactic out of business forever. 'Plug in and fuck off somewhere else for half an hour' is not a position you can really advertise in.
Unless it becomes 'watch ad to enable charger' 😬
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Well, sure, but not on our gas pumps. Only on TV and radio. And in magazines and movies and at ball games, on buses and milk cartons and T-shirts and bananas and written on the sky. But not on gas pumps. No, sir-ee!
One of the unlabeled buttons on the side of the screen should mute it. Whenever I find it, I'll take a pen or sharpie and mark which one is the mute button for future people who don't want to be subjected to that shit.
They will just disable the mute buttons. It happens around here all the time, marking them accelerates it.
I now avoid any gas station with immutable ads. But if I am in a pinch. The longest sharpest key on your key ring can slide right in and puncture the speaker, thus solving the issue more permanently.
The 2nd button down on the right side of the screen mutes it. I always hit it when pumping gas.
We shouldn’t have to OPT OUT of being assaulted. I’m bringing matches.
I've seen a couple where someone had torn out the speaker with a pen, car key, etc
A well placed sticker does the trick.
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It started happening a few years ago in my area. Maybe like right before the pandemic?
For a while some of the stations had a hidden option where you could hit one of the unmarked selection buttons and it would at least mute the ads. But starting around the end of last year they took that option away.
The only stations I know of that don't show ads are Costco (and I assume Sam's Club too, but idk). Plus they have slight discounts on gas because they are member only. But my local Costco station is such a headache to get through these days - even at around 9pm after the main store closes - that I not just go to a local Shell or Valero and resentfully try to ignore the fucking ads that always play.
It’s crazy how there are just more and more reasons popping up to go to Costco (e.g. supporting DEI, infinite return policy). I’m gonna get a membership.
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Yep. And a lot of the gas stations in my area have the auto-hold latches busted or removed, so you have to stand there and have a super loud ad screamed in your face. Which is why I now have a pack of reusable zip ties in my car that I will slap on the fill handle if I come across a pump like that. And no, that’s not dangerous - the stop mechanism in the pump handle operates such that the handle depresses further when the auto-shutoff engages, so it does not disrupt the safety of the filler mechanism.
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Can one accidentally disable the annoying shilling screen whilst jostling the nozzle toward the intended vehicular orifice?
Press and hold two buttons in each corner. If those don't work, try the other two. Keep iterating through pressing and holding one button on either side of the screen. Eventually, you will open a diagnostic menu. You can't do anything here without a passcode, but it will stop the ad.
I've only come across a few pumps where I could not figure out the combo before I finished pumping.
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