My wife and I are currently driving cross country (US), and earlier in the day we stopped at a Pilot gas station in Tennessee.
I exited the vehicle, tapped my card on the thing to authorize my card and pay, got about 30 bucks of gas, then went inside and paid for a drink and snacks with a different card.
300 miles later, we stop at another gas station and while we do we check our cards and notice a 150 dollar charge on the same card used for gas at that exact Pilot. Strangely the 30 dollar charge for the gas was there too. We immediately call our credit card company and they say its a pending charge and cannot do anything about it until its went through, so we pause the card.
I call the gas station itself and spoke to a manager, and was told its an authorization charge and will go away. 150 dollars is a crazy amount for an authorization charge and makes little sense to me, has anyone ever experienced this before? Is it normal?
(Meta: I didn’t know where else to put this, but wanted to ask my fellow Lemmites, is that okay?)
Update: The charge has been removed from our account, so alls good. This is the first time I have ever seen an authorization charge so big, so it scared me, thanks to everyone for informing me on these charges, I’ll know to keep my eye out in the future and not worry so much!
The best selling vehicle model in America is the Ford F-150, with gas tank sizes mostly above 30 gallons (exact size depends on model/options). The second best selling vehicle is the Chevy Silverado, whose gas tank is between 24-28 gallons.
At $3/gallon, that’s between $75 and $90 for the typical fill up.
For some vehicles (really large SUVs, premium SUVs that take premium grade gas), I can see $200+ tanks at certain gas prices we’ve seen in our recent past.
So it makes sense for a gas station to do a pre authorization for $100, maybe $150.
The other thing, too, though, is that the hold/pre-auth doesn’t matter if it’s a credit card that you just pay at the end of the month. It gets sorted out before your statement balance gets billed to you. It can get annoying if you’re using a debit card and your balance is low, but this is just another way that credit cards tend to be better than debit cards if you can handle the responsibility.
Pilot is a big truck station. I expect it isn’t unusual for customers to buy $900 worth of diesel in a single fillup.
Its just quite a scary thing to see when you’ve never seen it before. My wife and I do this trip 2-3 times a year, several days of driving to and fro, yet only just now saw it, so it scared us.
Scares hell out of my wife as well. She’s foreign and thinks she’s getting ripped off. Having hell explaining to her how this works in America.
Used to be $50. $150 sounds pretty crazy, but ultimately shouldn’t matter. I guess. 🤷🏻
Its credit, so i suppose it doesn’t actually matter unless your card is super strict or something, still 150 is a scary amount for most Americans to see just suddenly charged. Even if its temporary.
Wife saw $50 and flipped her shit! That used to be the normal charge, your post made me realize it’s way higher now.
My condolences lol.
Think of it as not even being charged. The hold/pre-authorization is just there to make sure that it can charge you that much if it needs to, but it never actually does charge you. It just tells your bank/card issuer that it might want to charge you up to that much.
Hotels and rental cars do this with huge amounts, too, to make sure that they can charge you for the stuff you charge to the room or if you keep a rental car for an extra week. But you don’t actually get charged for it until the merchant determines you did use those extra services for those extra charges.