The gas price sign

Unlike the menu board, which changes seasonally, or the marquee, which changes for events, the price sign changes daily, sometimes twice, and answers to nobody's calendar but the wholesale market's. Its numerals are either mechanical tiles flipped by a pole with a suction cup, requiring a person to climb a short ladder in whatever weather the day has offered, or digital segments lit from within, requiring only a keystroke from an office elsewhere. The two systems produce a distinctly different mood: the analog sign carries a visible human record, a slight tilt to the nines, a digit left upside down until someone notices; the digital sign is flawless and faintly sinister, changing while nobody watches. Both share a civic function that exceeds the station's own interest in it. A price sign readable from four hundred feet, in plain type, at a size no other roadside object bothers to reach, becomes the de facto public price index for a town, quoted in conversation more reliably than any actual market report. It is possible to drive an entire commute registering the changing digits without registering a single storefront alongside them, which says something about the sign's success as signage and very little about the storefronts. Two stations across the street from one another, a cent apart, will run each other out of the neighborhood eventually, one digit at a time.

Arthur Pell