Last night, I went to my local Mobil station to fill up Julie's car. I noticed that the on-pump advertisements for the Mobil SpeedPass had changed.

SpeedPass is this little thing you can put on your keyring with a unique identifier. You wave it in front of the gas pump and the pump detects the ID on the SpeedPass. You have a credit card tied to that ID; when it's time to pay, your credit card is charged behind the scenes without you having to get it out and run it through the pump. See? "Speed."

Aside: It's interesting that you can now use this at some McDonald's stores in Chicago. I remember having that idea back in the mid 1990's. I usually want Extra Value Meal #3 with a Coke. If I could drive-in, swipe my card, and hit a button marked "The Usual", the order would go in automatically, and they'd send me a bill at the end of the month. I wouldn't have to try to get my order across to the order taker, or worry about having money with me. (In the mid 1990's, those were two problems I had a lot, but that's another story altogether.)

Anyway, when I first noticed the SpeedPass ads on the pump, they offered a deal where you could get maybe a penny of every $whatever you spent in the store put into an educational fund for your kids. This didn't include gasoline purchases, which I always thought was funny, since I always read this while in the act of purchasing gasoline.

Yesterday, the ads said something like they'd give you 20% off cigarettes when you used your SpeedPass.

I bet the number of new SpeedPass users is going through the roof. "Cheap smokes? Where do I sign?!?"

The ad mentioned that there was a limit of two cartons of cigarettes per customer per day. I find that amazing. Isn't a carton something like ten packs?

This is for a limited time only, they say. I guess they'll go back to the lame "save money for your child's future" deal when the cigarette thing is over. But I see that they'll be counting gasoline purchases now. Perhaps they decided that alienating 100% of the people reading the ads (those pumping gas when gas purchasing didn't count) was a bad idea.