Im Tired Of Fuel Prices

[414Flyer]

Did you include the cost of the gas the merchants pay? Its a heck of a lot more than 65 cents a gallon right now.

 

[dmspilot00]

Gas prices right now are the result of greedy merchants, nothing else.

That would mean that almost every single merchant in the United States would be collaborating with each other to fix their prices, which would be illegal. Most gas stations are independently owned. In fact, I know of two Shell stations right across the street from each other on an extremely busy highway next to an I-95 interchange, and their prices are always a cent or five different.

You've got to be kidding me to say that every single merchant is gouging its prices. It is not possible. The RETAIL gasoline market is NOT an oligopoly, but quite the contrary--it is almost perfectly competitive. To say they are all fixing prices would break the laws of Economics. Wholesale petroleum IS an oligopoly, so that has to be where the high prices come from.

 

[j41driver]

PS - I did get a kick out of John Kerry talking about reducing our dependency on oil...then hopping in his fleet of Suburbans to drive to the airport and get aboard his wifes GV. (she let him use it..)

She must have moved up! She used to have a G-II, N57HJ.

 

[starchkr]

414...you are right, it costs the merchants around $0.87 right now, not $0.65, that is the cost to the refineries before production. Then add in taxes....blah blah blah...same result as before.

 

[414Flyer]

No, you are still wrong.
From DOE.gov

2004 Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun

Crude Oil
WTI - Cushing 34.31 34.68 36.74 36.75
Brent 31.28 30.86 33.63 33.59
Motor Gasoline
Conventional Regular
New York Harbor 99.84 104.73 109.13 111.95
U.S. Gulf Coast 98.39 102.70 108.98 114.89
Los Angeles 101.92 128.39 126.33 136.46
Rotterdam (ARA) 89.83 91.78 99.57 108.93
Singapore 105.55 94.95 105.11 104.89
Reformulated Regular
New York Harbor 100.02 104.31 108.37 114.80
U.S. Gulf Coast 100.06 103.59 110.61 114.73
Los Angeles 107.92 134.39 132.33 142.58

 

[A Squared]

A squared...

You can get more expensive materials from that same gallon of crude.

Right, like what? yeah there are some products which are more valuable, but the demand is very small so they are not produced in large quantities. example: lubricating oil, buck a quart for retail motor oil, but your car doesn't (or shouldn't) use as much motor oil as gasoline. That's why the refineries use more expensive techniques such as catalytic cracking to increase the yield of shorter molecule hydrocarbons such as gasoline. In general, the lighter the fraction, the higher the value. Gasoline is going to be one of the more valuable products from petroleum. Yeah, jet fuel is more expensive at the pump than gasoline, but that is due to taxes and handling requirements. It's really just Kerosene which is cheap compared to gasoline, it only gets expensive when you call it jet fuel. Propane is right around the same price as gasoline per gallon, which when you consider the more expensive handling and distribution, means that at the refinery it has less value than gasoline. Soooo, the point of all this is that if crude oil is a buck a gallon on the world market, and gasoline is the most valuable product produced in quantity, the price of the raw materials for gasoline are more than a buck a gallon.



Back to your original post, So a local merchant is selling gas at $1.40 a gallon? really, is he still doing it? now? today? How long has he been in business? If there was really all this magic profit to be made selling gas for 60 cents under what everyone else is selling it for, then why hasn't someone else done it? Ya think that the retailers who have been in the business a little more than a few weeks have figured out that over the long haul, you can't do that and make a profit. If there really is .60 cents a gallon of pure greed above and beyond a reasonable profit, then why doesn't some smart retailer start selling it for $1.70 a gallon? that's a reasonable profit *plus* 30 cents a gallon of pure greed, and people will be *flocking* to his pumps to buy gas at 30 cents a gallon below market price.

Or maybe, just maybe there's a little more to it than meets your eye.

 

[flyincheap]

Hmmm gas is still climbing!!

 

[jarhead]

OK, I did my part. I filled up my two cars, got my gas can for the lawn mowers filled, and I even topped off the 30 gallon tank in the boat. All on the 18th of May. Now I won't need to buy any gas on the 19th of May. Hope I helped out in reducing the pump price of gasoline.

 

[furloughfodder]

Speaking of high gas prices:

What is our genius President Dubbya doing to get this under check? He is practically in bed with the Crown Prince of Saudi and we are paying over $2.20 at the pumps?

Not to mention how this is killing all of us in the airline industry…

 

[EagleRJ]

Speaking of high gas prices:

What is our genius President Dubbya doing to get this under check? He is practically in bed with the Crown Prince of Saudi and we are paying over $2.20 at the pumps?

Not to mention how this is killing all of us in the airline industry…

You're right- It's all President Bush's fault. If Clinton was still in office, we'd still be paying $0.85/gal.