I joined Ampol in 1979 in Sydney as a Retail Representative, which meant looking after about 25 service stations around North Sydney. Most of the servos were company-owned, which meant they were run by franchisees, a few were owned by the people who ran them, contracting with the oil-company to supply the fuel and signage etc. In my area there were only about 2 or 3 which had been converted to Self-Serve. As Retro has pointed out, the normal servo was mainly a workshop with a shop to sell all the gear most motorists needed. The workshop was where he made his money, with the cream being made in the shop. The fuel was just enough to cover overheads and obviously draw customers in. Two of mine didn't have mechanics - one converted his lube-bay into a video rental shop, the other into a plant nursery, and both did really well. Another in Queensland supplied discount cigarettes and along with his workshop was a very wealthy man. We could see the time coming when oil companies found that owning and servicing a myriad of service stations wasn't as profitable as supplying bulk fuel to large customers, such as mining and transport companies. In other words, 20% of the customers took 80% of the fuel, while the other 80% of customers were through service stations to the general public. It was therefore more economic to either get out of the retail market completely or hand it all over to supermarket chains like Coles and Woolworths. Both Shell and Caltex (now Ampol again) have done that, while the rest have been taken up by independents such as Puma and National. The lube and service bays are usually sub-let to companies such as tyre retailers, if they haven’t already been taken over by the supermarket shop. When I joined the oil industry, there were nine major oil companies - Amoco, Ampol, BP, Caltex, Esso, Golden Fleece, Mobil, Shell and Total. The '80s saw a great deal of rationalisation; BP taking over Amoco, Caltex took over Golden Fleece, Ampol took over Total, and Esso and Mobil merged. Like most good things they all come to an end and that is the fate of the service station proprietor - someone well known and part of his community. As Silvercloud points out, much has been lost. By contrast, I wouldn't want to see a return of service stations such as the one we encountered in the Soviet Union in 1972...........