During a year and a half of steadily rising gasoline prices in the South Coast, two community stores have managed to keep their fuel prices among the lowest in the area - despite, or perhaps because of, their locations off the main highways, out of easy sight.

They are modest buildings modestly promoted: one a former house on a twisting ribbon of asphalt in the Glasgow area, the other a wood-sided structure in Eastside with a canopy advertising not fuel but personal greetings. But residents just out of reach of downtown North Bend and Coos Bay, along with the occasional savvy outsider, frequent those little-known outlets barely visible against more than a dozen others in Coos Bay, North Bend and surrounding areas.

For their owners, the pump or two outside a miniature grocery can provide local residents just enough reason not to drive to Coos Bay or North Bend - or it can be less a product in itself than an inducement for the customer to walk inside.

The gray-blue, houselike building on a winding Glasgow road appeared to be like any other small-town mini-market. On Friday morning neon signs glowed in the windows advertising various beer brands. To the right of the front door was a steel ice freezer, while above the door was hung a small wood-cut sign that read, simply, "Glasgow Store."

It was 7:30 a.m. and the parking lot was empty save for a vehicle belonging to Jack Stevens, the store owner. Then a white pickup truck pulled into the small parking lot in front of the building and a tall, crew-cut man stepped out - the day's first customer.

Behind an ice cream freezer doubling as a check-out counter, Stevens, a somewhat bulky man with thinning brown-white hair and glasses, poured coffee into a foam cup and headed outside to the parked pickup.

"On the house," he said, smiling, passing the cup to the driver and striking up a conversation with him. The first sale of the day would not be coffee but gasoline - from a single, almost forlorn mechanical pump at the corner of the building.

Though motorists passing by on East Bay Drive might miss the fuel pump in the blink of an eye, there still was one thing to grab attention: a folding sign announcing regular unleaded fuel for $2.10, the lowest price to be had in the Bay Area.

Even with just one fuel pump dispensing only regular-grade gasoline, Stevens estimated the Glasgow Store earns about a third of its income from fill-ups. But when the lifelong Bay Area resident first installed a tank 30 years ago, four years after taking over the store from his father, his thought was simply to get people - homeowners and drivers alike - to notice the business inside, which combines typical convenience-store fare with less common items like wines and a smattering of produce.

"If I price it the same or more, my gas prices dries up," he said. "So if I want to sell any gas and get people into my store, I have to be a penny or three less."

Whatever extra revenue he spurns from fuel outside, he said, is more than made up for inside, where Glasgow Market makes the bulk of its revenue.

"If I can stay a cent or two under (other stations), that'll give me the customer base I need," Stevens said. "If they can come in and buy a couple of cans of pop or a bottle of water or some candy bars - that's what I need in my store."

A half-hour later at the opposite end of the Bay Area, a female cashier at the TNT Market shifted in seconds from cashier to fuel attendant.

The woman slid a few groceries into a paper sack for a contractor already with one eye on his parked pickup. A moment later she took a few quick strides out the door under a wooden canopy topped not with the logo of an international oil company, but with a message board reading "WELCOME BACK DAVID ANTHONY." Unhitching a fuel nozzle from one of two pumps, inserted it into the side of a Volkswagen convertible and strode back inside.

Gasoline was a part of TNT Market's business even before Tom Craig purchased the store 22 years ago. But its reputation as a low-cost gas stop came about much later, he said, when he decided to turn an expensive replacement into an opportunity.

When stricter standards for underground fuel tanks forced an upgrade in 1999, Craig remembered, "I took out the old tanks and put in larger ones (totaling 7,000 gallons), which made it possible to buy at a better price because I could buy a bigger quantity of gas."

Craig, whose fuel station is supplied by Dedicated Fuels Inc. of North Bend, attributed some of the price differences among brands to the different additives mixed with each company's product.

Though a single pipeline owned by Kinder Morgan Inc., with a terminal in Eugene, supplies gasoline for the whole of Coos County, oil companies set their brands of fuel apart by adding specific blends detergents and other ingredients, according to Bob Johnston, a coastal manager for Tyree Oil Inc., which supplies the Glasgow Store. The additives are blended at the depot, before fuel is loaded onto tankers bound for South Coast towns.

"When trucks are loading the product at the pipeline, they're getting the finished product," he said Friday.

Though a separate division of Tyree Oil provides fuel for 76 (formerly Union/76) outlets in the Willamette Valley - with a different fuel blend to match - Johnston described the products of major-label station and mom-and-pop store as more alike than different.

"They have their own additive packages but it's a similar product," he said. "Every oil company wants to say it has the best additive package... but it depends more on the octane you burn."

For Craig, his store's place as a fuel price leader is welcome but no great cause for celebrity, just a necessity to convince locals to shop locally.

"I'm not trying to be the lowest," he said nonchalantly, dressed in a Mickey Mouse-and-Pluto aloha shirt as he stood inside his convenience store on a Friday morning off. "All I want is to be in the mix, to make it so it's not worth it for people to drive into town. I have no illusions about being some big magnate who influences the marketplace," he added with a slight grin.

TNT Market's place as a lower-cost seller of fuel has become more visible as the South Coast's price levels have swollen to over $2 per gallon, resulting in nearly 100 complaint letters since July from area residents to the state Attorney General's office. But even the state's decision to open an investigation into regional pricing policies Craig regarded as a tempest in a teapot, saying gasoline is no more a burden on one's income than a generation ago.

"Compared to the minimum wage, the price of gas hasn't changed much in the last 35 years," said the 54-year-old La Grande native. When I was a teenager in the '60s it was about 35 cents a gallon and the minimum wage was $1.10. Now the minimum is $7.05 in Oregon and gas is $2.15 or $2.20." He smiled wryly.

"It's interesting to think about, when you hear people talk about how cheap gas used to be."

(Attempts to reach Dedicated Fuels Inc. for this story were unsuccessful.)