PAM

Brief History

PAM was the brand introduced in the 1950s on downstream oil operations by Steenkolen Handelsvereeniging (SHV), a large coal wholesaler based in the Netherlands. By the late 1960s it had retail operations in the Netherlands, Austria, Germany and possibly Denmark, but its owners decided that they could not compete with the large international oil companies. The Austrian chain was sold in 1971 to the state owned OROP and the merged company took the name Elan (see under OMV). The Dutch and Danish operations were operated for many years in a joint venture with Chevron, known locally as Calpam (although petrol/gasoline was sold exclusively under the Chevron name). Only in Germany did the PAM trademark survive, although by the mid-1980s it was owned by a French distributor, Docks de France (latterly Bolloré) and in the 1990s the name was replaced by Calpam.

SHV later developed the Makro cash & carry stores, many of which sold own-brand petrol, but these were sold in 1997 to the German group, Metro.

Maps

The map of the Netherlands (left) dates from around 1965 and shows a logo that was to be be replaced within a year or so. It was printed on poor quality shiny paper and prepared by Bootsma (Falk plan) at a scale of 1:300,000. In common with most Dutch maps, it was not given away but sold for Hfl 0.90. Of a similar age, the Freytag-Berndt map of Austria features a Pam service station in Klagenfurt on the front cover. It uses better paper than the Dutch map, but is at the smaller scale of 1:600,000. The logo on the Dutch map is burgundy, but for the Austrian map a bright red was used, suggesting a lack of central design control.

No Calpam or Pam maps are known from other countries where the operations were quite small.