The practice dates to the 1920s in most areas and by the 1940s, it was everywhere. There are 2 reasons.
In the 1920s, gas was averaging 10-12 cents per gallon. It was difficult to raise prices by 1 cent, because that would represent a 10% increase, which was a lot of money. Gas station owners and oil companies needed a finer pricing method that would allow smaller incremental movements either up or down. So they started the fractions.
In the 1930s there were various state and federal taxes imposed on gasoline sales. Again, because 1 cent would have been a HUGE tax back then, they needed to tax in fractional cent increments. Some of these taxes are still on the books in fractional increments.
Obviously, the practice is completely obsolete today, but it goes to show once you set a "standard" way of doing things, like railroad tracks being 4 feet 8 and 1/2 inches apart, no matter how odd or obsolete the logic was to derive it, it persists forever.
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Today's Featured Article - Listening to Your Tractor - by Curtis Von Fange. Years ago there was a TV show about a talking car. Unless you are from another planet, physically or otherwise, I don’t think our internal combustion buddies will talk and tell us their problems. But, on the other hand, there is a secret language that our mechanical companions readily do speak. It is an interesting form of communication that involves all the senses of the listener. In this series we are going to investigate and learn the basic rudimentary skills of understanding this lingo.
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