Back in the days when Dinosaurs ruled the earth I worked in a service station. Nothing unusual about that. Lots of teenagers did since it seemed like there was one on every street corner and all of then needed cheap help.

We had one of these and charged batteries for $1. I think it took an hour for a 'quick charge'; overnight for a deep charge.

This is when minimum wage was about 50 cents an hour or something. Maybe 65 cents. In any case $1 was real money to a lot of our customers.

And they expected us to use real equipment, hence these giant chargers. I would tell my friends to just put the battery back in the car, jump the engine and let the thing charge up. Gas was about 21 cents a gallon. Sometimes you could find it for 18 cents.

In any case running the car at idle for two hours was cheaper than paying me a dollar for the same thing.

You could buy a new battery then for $15. Or you could buy a weeks worth of groceries with the same money. My last battery cost $186.

Now excuse me. There are kids on my lawn and I need to yell at them.