It has to do with petroleum products and nacho cheese sauce. It has to do with people at both ends of the economic spectrum colliding in an unplanned daily ritual. It involves the odd behaviors and incredulous dietary decisions that happen when a snack shack turns into a restaurant. And, it turns out, this 21st-century phenomenon – part filling station, part coffee house, part homeless waystation, part junk food drive-thru – is a fascinating social experiment and a rare, strange, freak-filled science project that, at some point, involves just about every modern life form.

I’ve made it my job to study, analyze, judge and monitor the activity, customs and human traffic flow at what use to be called the AM/PM MiniMart – now it’s called the Day-n-Night Snack Restaurant/Homeless Shelter That Happens To Sell Gas. This has meant visiting the “gas-n-snack” every other day for a period of years. (My social calendar is a bit thin.)

The reason why there’s been a spike in homelessness is that the bums at the AM/PM make it look so damn sexy … cigarettes, beer, none of the pressures that come with daily grooming and access to every food covered in sugar or salt on the face of the earth … shit, where do I sign up!

Actually, the homeless gal you encounter at the AM/PM on a Tuesday could be working behind the counter on a Thursday. Really. The AM/PM is the curb that separates the homeless from mainstream society; it’s the absolute last stop on the employment highway, it’s the job people get after a month on the street and it’s the final gig they’ll have before being homeless again. That’s how it works. A dude could be on his bike chain-smoking out in front one day and the next he’s behind the counter taking your money and printing out lottery tickets. Then, alas, a month later he’s back on the bike drinking Old English 800.

The people who work there are either really fat or really skinny. Most of them have some sort of nervous tick or a dental problem or cognitive processing issue. The really skinny ones work there because they get discounts on cigarettes and energy drinks, while the really fat ones work there because, duh, they get discounts on chips and Hostess doughnuts.

It used to be that a guy would go out and pump his gas and if he had any change coming he would get a snack, but now most dudes go inside first and buy ten or twelve crunchy things and then spend the two or three dollars left on fuel.

Inside the restaurant, the lines can get pretty long partly because the workers have a hard time making change. But the customers do plenty to slow things to a crawl. AM/PM only takes cash or ATM cards. This confuses many of the gassers/snackers. Since life is made possible by the credit card, most gas is purchased with money people don’t have using cards that are at their limits. This reality causes the average AM/PM customer to scramble … Do I have a debit card that won’t be declined? Do I have any cash? Purses might get poured out on the counter, all pockets might get emptied. People at the AM/PM Restaurant are very likely to pay for things with spare change, seventy-seven cents on pump twelve, please. There is always a feeling here that people are spending their last buck … Let’s see, I only have this five dollar bill and I need gas, lunch and a Quick Pick.

At the AM/PM you can buy a dozen glazed donuts shaped like the hashtag symbol (I have no idea why, I guess gluttony is trending). You can buy sodas and a version of a Slurpee in sizes ranging from a small bathroom cup to huge buckets with handles. They sell food under heat lamps and 176 kinds of chips including “bilingual” chips that only get bought by dudes working on landscaping crews. At some point during the day, every guy working construction within a ten-mile radius will come in here and buy twenty-four ounces of liquid caffeine and some form of beef jerky (they have an aisle dedicated to dried meats).

Only at the AM/PM will you find a guy in a three-piece suit putting sweaty condiments on a Dodger Dog that was somehow prepared by a homeless person and then stand in line to give his money to a toothless gal who will be on welfare this time next month.

It’s a sociology lesson. The blue-collar crowd sees it as a restaurant with gas; the white-collar class sees it as a chance to save a few pennies and then buy a five-dollar bottle of designer water. Immigrants in work trucks, pull up next to trophy wives in Range Rovers; retired folks blend with young kids ditching school. The destitute, the cheapskate,  the corporate executive and the junk-food addict converge every day to dance a dance orchestrated by an unskilled employee who is balanced on the lowest rung of the socioeconomic ladder.

If America is a melting pot, your local gas-n-snack is filling the pot with processed nacho cheese and virtually everyone is dipping their chip.

Photo credit: Jacek.NL on Visual Hunt /CC BY-NC-ND