Chevron to End Different Prices for Cash, Credit : Marketing: The oil giant said it is responding to calls from ‘quite a few customers’ in eliminating its surcharge for users of charge cards.

Listening to customers’ concerns and saying it desires to improve its service, Chevron announced Tuesday that it is ending its eight-year experiment of offering different gasoline prices to cash and credit customers.

It will instead adopt a single-price policy at about 4,000 service stations west of the Rockies and in Kentucky, Indiana and Ohio, a spokeswoman said.

The company is eliminating the 3% credit card processing fee that has been in effect since 1982 and is suggesting that all of its independent dealers adopt the new program.

The new pricing policy went into effect Tuesday at some of the stations, and virtually all of them are expected to make the conversion by April 2.

Sheila M. Taylor, a spokeswoman for the San Francisco oil company, said the move was made partly in response to suggestions for uniform prices from “quite a few customers.”

Since 1982, Chevron, along with some other oil companies, has offered customers a choice of using cash or credit cards to pay for gasoline. Cash customers paid slightly lower prices than those who used credit cards.

Chevron stations in California offered discounts averaging 4 to 5 cents a gallon to cash customers, Taylor said.

“It was something that made sense in the market at the time, and now the market has changed,” Taylor said.

“We expect the credit customer will pay a lower price, and the cash customer will still pay a competitive price,” she added.

There are about 12,000 Chevron stations nationwide, and Taylor said each Chevron dealer makes the final decision on pricing.

Taylor said the company began conducting consumer and dealer surveys earlier last year to discover “the economics” involved in a price change.

“We think in the long run our earnings will improve,” Taylor said.