The gas pump asks for five digits before it lets you buy gasoline, even though the station has no obvious reason to know where you live. It feels like an unnecessary interrogation from a machine that will happily sell you 12 gallons of fuel without learning your name.
The usual explanation involves credit card fraud prevention, not a gas station’s curiosity about your neighborhood. That ZIP code can help a payment system check whether the person using a credit card knows information associated with the cardholder’s billing address. However, the request doesn’t work the same way for every payment method or every station. And if you’ve ever entered your ZIP code three times while a line of cars formed behind you, there’s a reason this seemingly simple security check can become surprisingly complicated.
