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By Terry Caesar

I’m driving near my home in San Antonio, Texas, and a warning light suddenly appears on my dashboard. The car’s manual explains that its cause is more likely to be low air pressure in one or more of the tires rather than some malfunction in the monitoring mechanism. Solution: find an air pump at a gas station.

But wait. These pumps are not so common as they used to be; many gas stations don’t have one. Worse, many lack the gauge whereby you can first check the tire’s pressure before pumping the air. Worst of all, at many pumps you have to deposit twenty-five or fifty cents in order to gain access to air in the first place.

I can remember when attendants at gas stations—or “service stations,” as they used to be called—customarily inquired (usually after pumping your gas) if you wanted your oil and tires checked. These days are gone now in the United States. There are no more attendants. You pump your own gas; you check your own tires.

Of course these days remain in Brazil, to the amazement of visiting Americans. To this day, it’s as rare in Brazil to escape service—beginning with giving the attendant the keys to your tank—as it is in the United States to encounter service. The two societies could not be more diametrically opposed than when it comes to gas stations. How can we explain the difference?

There is no doubt that one explanation for the presence of attendants themselves has to do with the rarity of automobile ownership in Brazil, relative to its pervasiveness in the United States. The more that Brazilians drive their own cars, the more they are going to be expected to provide self-service, beginning at the pump.

As it is, the degree of service is only possible in a society where automobile ownership automatically confers status—and therefore presumes a degree of service that confirms this status. Once it was special—arousing envy, meriting distinction—to own a car in Brazil. No more. And yet the service proper to those days abides. Will service diminish in Brazil, as auto ownership continues to increase?

What about the class system? Is the customary nature of service found at any Brazilian gas station based upon a division between social classes—those who own cars versus the attendants who service them? If in the United States this particular manifestation of the division no longer remains, (the job of gas station attendant having all but vanished) in Brazil it appears to be as necessary as ever.

Much work in Brazil strikes an American as labor-intensive. Enter a typical store of any sort in Brazil, and you will encounter two or three times the salespeople you would expect in the US. These people, in turn, come from the same social class as gas station attendants. Honest, respectable, legitimate work must be found for every member of this class.

Understood in more comprehensive terms, the job of gas station attendant makes social and political sense. The job is part of something. A frentista not only (as its name suggests) forms the exterior of a larger organization of automobile service. Such service, in turn, is embedded in a more comprehensive ideal of direct, personal day-to-day contact among people in a business context. It may not always be efficient, but it keeps the society whole.

No wonder Brazilians customarily find American society to be “impersonal.” Compared to Brazil, it is. Or rather, it can afford to be, thereby consigning, for example, the job of filling up your gas tank to you yourself (or leaving the job of checking the air pressure of your tires to a garage). In such contrast to Brazil, it seems as if the United States today no longer cares about the whole class of people represented by gas station attendants.

Some years ago I chanced to be in the company of a young Brazilian who was suddenly amazed to see a little coin-operated newspaper stand; you simply deposit your coins into a slot and the stand opens so you could select your newspaper. “What’s to prevent someone from taking all the newspapers?” he cried. “Brazilians wouldn’t trust each other not to do this,” he declared.

What to reply? That it’s not that Americans trust each other more than Brazilians trust each other? That instead American society is simply organized differently? I tried to explain. Americans are accustomed to giving up to machines measures of work (broadly speaking) that Brazilians are accustomed to retaining for people; hence, the way each society organizes the selling of newspapers.

Or the way a society organizes the selling of gasoline for automobiles. As an American, I can’t say anymore in which society I’d prefer to “fill up.” In Brazil the process is certainly more time-consuming. But it’s also more comfortable—you don’t even have to get out of the car! On the other hand, I can certainly say in which society I’d prefer to check the tire pressure. I’d still be driving on poorly inflated tires if I hadn’t found a garage.

Terry Caesar is an American writer currently living in Texas who has spent time in Brazil. He is the author of several books, which are available on Amazon.com. His most recent book is a memoir entitled, Before I Had a Mother.