By Dennis Oda Star-Bulletin
Texaco station owner Hazel Araki, 73, still pumps gas
after 36 years at Jimmy's & Son's Texaco Service station
in Ewa Beach. But Texaco will terminate the lease on
her station and 12 others as of Sept. 22.
FOR the past 36 years, Hazel Araki has devoted much of her life to running a gas station in Ewa Beach.
She and her family have managed Jimmy's & Son's Texaco on Fort Weaver Road since the year before President Kennedy was assassinated.
Each weekday Araki, 73, reports to the station by 4 a.m. She doesn't head home until 5 p.m. Thirteen-hour work days. Five days a week. For 36 years.
"I practically live at the station," says Araki.
Although she isn't ready to retire, Araki wonders whether her days as a gas-station dealer are numbered.
Texaco Inc. says Araki's lease will end in late September. By then, the oil giant plans to sell its 28 Oahu stations and a Barbers Point storage terminal to meet conditions of a consent agreement tied to Texaco's national joint venture with Shell Oil Co.
To obtain state and federal approval for that $17 billion merger, the two companies agreed that one would divest its Oahu stations and terminal. Otherwise, regulators said, the merged entity on Oahu would have violated antitrust laws.
Texaco decided to sell its assets. It has told 13 dealers their leases will end Sept. 22. (The remaining 15 Oahu stations are company operated.)
If the dealers want to continue running the stations, they must work out new agreements with the buyer.
The problem is the dealers don't know who the buyer will be, what kind of terms the buyer will insist on or whether the dealers will be able to continue operating the same kind of services they do now.
Such uncertainty has prompted some dealers to stop hiring, to cut back on ordering parts and to hold off on major upgrades or purchases.
Some worry they may have to walk away from their livelihoods and from tens of thousands of dollars invested in the stations.
"It's depressing," said Andy Pung, who has operated Andy's Texaco Service at the foot of Diamond Head since 1985. "But what can I do? I can't do anything."
By Ken Sakamoto, Star-Bulletin
Andy Pung of Andy's Texaco Service near Diamond
Head is one of the dealers whose future is clouded by
the uncertainty surrounding the merger and
consent agreement.
The dealers tried unsuccessfully to convince a federal court and the Federal Trade Commission to do away with the required divestiture, saying the Attorney General's Office, which negotiated the consent agreement, was wrong to force a sale."It just blows my mind the damage being done to these dealers," said Larry Hoe, a Texaco employee who works with the dealers but stressed he was speaking personally and not for Texaco. "Their whole lives are in these stations."
The federal entities, however, approved the consent agreement last month.
Now, for the dealers, it's a matter of waiting, though some still hold out hope the agreement will be reversed.
Norman Stanley, a Texaco spokesman, said his company intends to stick to the Sept. 22 date and has been communicating with interested parties. Asked what would happen if no buyer was in place by then, Stanley declined to address that possibility, saying everything is geared to meet the September date.
The consent agreement requires that Shell-Texaco keep the affected assets viable and marketable until the divestiture is complete.
In addition, Deputy Attorney General Ted Clause said the dealers' rights are protected by their leases and federal law.
He said the uncertainty they now face would have arisen even without the required divestiture.
"The uncertainty comes from the merger," Clause said.
When two companies join forces, they typically evaluate their combined assets and determine what should be consolidated, and that likely would have been no different with Shell-Texaco, he noted.
Such reasoning is little comfort to Araki and the other dealers.
"I can't plan anything," she says. "Everything is up in the air."
