Technology is key, both in trimming overhead and in offering new services, such as Internet access at gas pumps so consumers can check their stocks and such while filling up.  [My emphasis] 

Eureka! A solution has at last been found to one of the great unmet needs of our civilization! Once this marvelous innovation is in place, you will never again experience the dread of being cut off from the NASDAQ -- helpless, isolated, unable to respond to the latest crucial market movement -- merely because you had to pull in and gas up your sports-utility vehicle.

Forget the fall of the Berlin Wall: The triumph of entrepreneurial capitalism is now complete. How could Marx and Engels prevail against an economic system so imaginative, so creative, as to find a way to give you stock quotations right at the gas pump?

It is hard to resist a bit of Trotskyite impulse in the face of this particular innovation. You have to wonder if the person who devised it has ever actually been inside a convenience store. If the 7-11 around the corner from me is at all typical, most are staffed by part-time employees making just over the minimum wage, and frequented by careworn people who line up every Wednesday to buy lottery tickets. Checking up on the stock market while they pump gas is surely the last thing on their minds.

At the very least, this item could easily justify yet another moral fulmination about market madness and dot-com dementia, here combined in perfect tandem. If price-earnings ratios of infinity (actually negative numbers: positive price / negative earnings = negative P/E) weren't enough to convince you that the market is a colossal speculative bubble just waiting to burst, surely this should do it. An economy that can come up with stock readouts at gas pumps is surely headed for a terrible fall.

No, what really intrigues me about this idea is its sheer bizarreness -- up there with items in News of the Weird. That, and its truly outstanding folly. Can you imagine any other service quite so unnecessary? Yes, sure, any economist will tell you that "necessity" is subjective. I went some 40 years without an Internet connection and never missed it; now I'd hate to be without it. But I'm not persuaded that you, or I -- or much of anyone else -- would ever miss not being able to log on for stock quotations while pumping gas.

There's also the merely practical aspect. Let's see: you take off the gas cap and slide in the nozzle with one hand while typing in your user name and password with the other. But what happens if the update on your Red Hat Linux shares comes on the screen just as the tank is filled and the nozzle clicks off? Do you really want to stand there, making your trade, while the guy behind you ... the one with the cowboy hat and really big pickup truck ... is waiting for his turn at the pump?

Yet -- here is the delicious irony -- this idea has already shown itself to be entirely practical and useful for someone. After all, I did not make it up. It really was in the Wall St. Journal, right there on the front page. I don't think Journal reporter Pamela Sebastian Ridge made it up either.

Somewhere, some high-powered consultant actually came up with this idea. He (surely a he; no woman would have invented this!) worked it up into a glossy presentation, complete with all the slides and diagrams you crank out from Microsoft Office or Corel Suite 8. He then pitched it -- successfully -- to the rest of the consulting team, who in turn pitched it to the National Association of Convenience Stores.

And got paid handsomely for it.

What could be more practical than that? .