End of the road
Yarmouth County gas station closes after credit card fees continually chew away at small profit margins
“I wouldn’t sell it to anyone as a gas station, I wouldn’t do that to anyone. It’s just not fair to sell it as a gas station because we know it’s not feasible anymore.” Kerry Muise Owner
During his first two years on the job at the Yarmouth County gas station, Ritchie Hopkins pumped the gas, but he was never one of the customers that pulled up to the pumps.
He didn't have his driver's licence, so he didn't have a car. Instead, he rode his bicycle to work – winter, spring, summer and fall.
Pleasant weather, rain or a snowstorm – it didn't matter.
When he did have a car, and if he had left work without gassing up, he'd put $5 in the tank at another gas station – enough to get him back to his place of work where he could fill up his tank.
“I always supported the garage that paid me,” he says.
And so, when D.K. Muise Motors, the gas station he worked at, permanently closed its doors on the afternoon of Friday, March
11, it was only fitting to the business's owners Kerry and Daniel Muise that it would be Hopkins who would lock the door for the final time.
Just a few months shy of 46 years on the job, he was the last longest-serving employee.
The gas station opened in 1955. The first owner was Pat Stoddard. While it became a Shell station, it had first started out as a White Rose station. For a long time, it was also known as Murphy Motor Sales as generations of the Murphy family owned and operated it.
Then the Muises took it over 12 years ago and it became D.K. Muise Motors.
DIFFICULT DECISION
It is with a heavy heart that the owners have closed the business, but they say the economics left them little choice.
Credit cards fees did them in.
“Over the 12 years since we bought the station, the use of credit cards has gone way, way up,” says Kerry Muise.
“It used to be mostly cash and debit and credit, and now it's about at least 50 per cent of the business is credit cards.”
As the price of gas kept going up over the years, the business kept losing more and more of what little profit margin it had to credit card fees.
When gas was around $1 a litre, Kerry says they were making, on average, a profit margin of six cents per litre, or $6 dollars on 100 litres of gas. As the cost of gas kept increasing, and credit card usage climbed, they eventually got to a point more recently where they were only being left with around a one-cent-alitre profit margin because the credit card fees were chewing up most of the profit.
“It's just not feasible for small-volume stations and we're small volume,” she says. “Even though we sell more now than we ever have, that price margin is just not increasing enough. If you're selling six million litres a year, like the ones in town, you can take the loss on that.”
But with a gas station their size with just two pumps, it was just too hard.
Daniel Muise says when they were left making $1.25 in profit on 100 litres of gas – depending on the cost of gas at the time, coupled with the credit card fees – they were still needing to pay the wages, heat, lights, permits, insurance. "We can't do it,” he says. “It's a shame, but it's not viable.”
On face value, closing the station was the obvious decision.
But it didn't make it any less emotional.
“It's five jobs,” Kerry says, her voice breaking with emotion. “We delayed making the decision because of that.”
The property and building have been sold. The location won't be used as a gas station again.
“I wouldn't sell it to anyone as a gas station, I wouldn't do that to anyone,” Kerry says. “It's just not fair to sell it as a gas station because we know it's not feasible anymore.”
D.K. Muise Motors – located on Highway 3 where it straddled the Arcadia-Pleasant Lake boundary line – was one of the last remaining gas stations in Yarmouth County where employees still pumped people's gas, as opposed to being completely self-serve.
Asked why it was important to still be a full-service station, Kerry says, “Because there's a lot of people who don't know how to pump gas, don't want to pump gas and can't pump gas. There's a lot of people that can't get out of their car for various reasons. We had several wheelchair clients who loved coming