Esso station owners and attendants in Germany are giving mixed reviews of the new fuel ration card, with some voicing vague unease about processing problems and concern about an English-only help line and customers’ ability to access their account balances.
Others say it’s misunderstandings, not malfunctions, that are causing the problems.
Both Esso and the Army and Air Force Exchange Service dismissed the worries, attributing the claims of problems to confusion over the system and what it’s expected to do.
"I have had several customers whose card did not work right," said Jennifer Ade, an employee at the Esso station in Ramstein-Miesenbach. She maintained that it’s impossible for cashiers or customers to know how much ration a card has left until a transaction is complete, leaving customers with no option but to pump and hope they have enough.
Despite Ade’s assertion, that’s not the case.
Customers can keep old receipts to track their balances or call an automated hot line to get up-to-date information.
Lt. Col. David Konop, an AAFES spokesman, suggested that customers can also check their account at the fuel card Web site, which takes about a minute. Stations can also swipe ration cards to get the balance, he said. "You can ask the cashier to do that for you."
Still, not all the attendants speak English — a point that one employee said made it hard to provide good customer service when things went wrong.
"We can give them a phone number for a hot line, but the hot line is in English," said Melanie Schmitt, an Esso employee in Kaiserslautern. Customers can try to pass the hot line advice on to the cashier, but "if the customers do not speak German and we do not speak English, we simply do not understand."
Konop said it sounded like she’s referring to the English-only customer hot line.
"There’s a number out there that AAFES and Esso stations are supposed to call if there’s a problem with a customer," he said, and that line has both English and German menus.
Marc Immisch, Esso’s card operation manager for central Europe, said they’re monitoring the system and that so far it’s working well.
"Yes, there have been some cases in which transactions were denied, but these are few," he said.
Those denied transactions also might be customers’ faults, according to Bjoern Kahrau, an Esso station owner in Landstuhl.
"The principle is simple; if you only have 50 liters on your card, you cannot [pump] 51 liters," Kahrau said. "In such a case, it is just normal that the cards do not function."
Stars and Stripes’ Marcus Klöckner contributed to this report.
