While on our trip home from Winnipeg yesterday, we stopped in Indian Head, Saskatchewan (Aside: The story behind the town's name isn't as bad as you might expect, except for all the people that died from small pox) to get some gas and the first place we stopped at said they were all out of regular and that they couldn't get ahold of their manager to tell them what to do.  So instead, they were sending people down the street to the Esso, this one as a matter of fact, (Aside: Did Google seriously street view every small town in Canada?  Even just doing all the ones along the main highways would take forever!) where they would probably have gas.

Contrast that with Apple's own stores - it all comes back to Apple here folks - where:

Individual Apple Stores have immense latitude when it comes to making customers happy. If a Genius feels as though you need to get your iPhone swapped out, they can just go ahead and do that without even checking with a manager.

via Andy Ihnatko

So the first gas station attendant was sending all their customers to the competition rather than being able to simply drop the price of premium gasoline temporarily to keep customers at their store, buying drinks and snacks and coming away with a good customer experience story that they'd surely tell their friends about.