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Report Your Local Gas Prices Here (retired discussion, please see the new one)
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To stay on topic.....Reporting on gas prices...I spend time in Venenzuela from time-to-time. Couple of weeks ago, it was U.S. 31 cents/gal. Same refining techniques. We have oil reserves just like Venezuela does.
Really makes one question what's going on in this country. All the gov't and the refineries do is try to avert our attention away from them onto something/someone else as the cause.....all the while they are posting obscene record qtr after record qtr of profits.
I did notice today that Valero dropped its price by 5 cents for 87 but was still charging $3.02 for 89. Shell, Exxon, and Hess are all holding at $2.79 for 87, with 10-cent spreads for the higher grades.
To stay on topic, fueled up today @ 3.13 at my normal spot (Meijers). Fuel at the Shell by work jumped to $3.25 (up $0.12 from Sunday) yesterday morning followed by the BP (which was $3.13) in the afternoon. I'm guessing the Mobil @ $3.19 will be next. :sick:
I figure the city is $0.10 more at least and downtown Chi-town... :sick: :sick:
The conspiracy to jack them up is slipping up! :P
Rocky
First year for 426 Hemi in a production car
Price of gas in 1966 — 32 cents/gallon
Price of gas in 2006 - 3 dollars/gallon
which makes it a lot cheaper than 40 years ago compared to everything else. Most incomes have gone up a lot more than 9.37 times since 1966. The Mustang sold for 2500 in '66 and today you're looking at 29500 for a GT Coupe, equipped.
As far as more refineries. I know for a fact that CA Legislature blocked more than a few attempts to build more in our state.
Some things have gone up a lot more than 9.37 times since 1966. I found an old property tax bill for my house from 1961. $200. Now I doubt if it had gone up much by 1966. This year it's $2800 though, and that's actually cheap for my neighborhood. One saving grace is that the house has been in the family for so long that it's benefitted from a property tax cap.
40 years ago, gasoline might have been more expensive or about the same in relation to the typical income, but I think people tended to keep more of their incomes back then. Today they find all sorts of ways to get it out of you in higher state and local taxes, higher social security, making you fund your own retirement through 401k's, etc.
FWIW, if you plug 32 cents into an inflation calculator, that comes out to about $1.88 today. But I'm sure that if gasoline were going for about $1.88 per gallon instead of $3.00+, we'd STILL be whining about it! I remember back in the summer of 2000, it went up to about that around here, but then prices cooled down soon after. By late 2001/early 2002 it was under a buck a gallon in many places.
Now 40 years ago I wasn't even born yet. I got my first car in 1987. Back then a gallon of gas was often about a dollar a gallon, sometimes less. But I was only making $3.75 per hour! So yeah, today I pay $3+ per gasoline and it's a much smaller percentage of my income. But I'd also like to think that I'm worth a bit more than $3.75 per hour today. :shades:
This is where some of y'alls local gas price you are paying goes. :sick:
Rocky
That profit's going somewhere though...the pockets of the CEO's and other corporate brass, maybe?
Shell has actually been a bigger winner for me. Since April 2005 the share price has gone up about 16%, and when you factor in dividend payments, it comes out to like a 20% return.
That article seems to be good news for Exxon stock, though. It's just gone up about 30 cents per share in the amount of time it's taken me to type this post.
Rocky
Well, I only have 25 shares of Exxon, and around 86 shares of Shell, so I'm not exactly taking an oil bath here! :P Still, I'd say I've made enough to buy about 400 gallons of mid-grade. Which is enough to send my old Silverado about 5400 miles.
Trust me though, I've paid the oil companies more than they've paid me!
Premium on a recent trip, 10 miles from nowhere on interstate 5 was $3.31 for premium.
We're being gouged, plain and simple.
I wouldn't touch more oil stocks with a ten-foot pole; oil production stocks might still have upside (I haven't looked 'cause I don't skate on thin ice with elephants). A year ago was a good time to buy oil stocks. When you hear any talking head on TV recommend a stock, sell. I once had a broker start recommending a stock I had found on my own after I bought using him.
I think the higher price in the 'distressed neighborhoods' are a danger penalty. Higher pay, more theft, higher insurance risk for business and property insurance. Would you work at a Speedway station in the heart of crackdom?
2014 Malibu 2LT, 2015 Cruze 2LT,
Oh - and that was *100* miles from nowhere. Kettleman City, CA. Look it up on a map. It used to be $3.00 a gallon when it was $2.20 everyplace else. Now it's $3.19 for regular. They have to truck their fuel THREE HOURS to get it there and it's less for premium than it is for regulat five miles from the refinery in Los Angeles.
Los Angeles, which is right next to the second largest port in the U.S., has refineries, and no problem shipping, plus is the single largest urban area in the U.S. in terms of miles driven and cars on the road(so we should get a quantity discount if anything)...
We have the highest prices in the entire country. $3.35 was the lowest that I could find(other than Arco at 5 cents less) Their 87 grade is really junk, though. I won't consider it.
We're being gouged, plain and simple.
Rocky
P.S.
Local Gas Price in Dumas is $2.93 at the Phillips Station and $2.99 at the Valero stations stations.
It's greed, plain and simple.
PS
It may be greed. We have to put that on the governments of the countries we buy the oil from. I don't think the refineries are making any more now than before. Canada, Mexico and Saudi are all getting the big bucks for oil. Thanks to our commodity traders running the price up. The Canadian economy is BOOMING at our expense.
Back across the Hudson, things are getting out of hand. The cheapest 87 in the neighborhood is all the way up to $3.35-$3.39.
If you're wondering why we NYers don't fill up in NJ all the time, there's a pesky $5 toll to get back from the Garden State ($6 if you don't have EZ-Pass, which, as I was reminded again today, lots and lots of people do not).
$2.89/$3.02/$3.11
Central Kentucky
I see allot of posts complaining about Gas prices in California. Isn't that the price you pay for living in Paradise?
Where a Home valued at $80.000 anywhere else goes for $300,000 in Los Angeles?
That's the cheapest it's been in months. Weird. We had a tax increase and prices fall. Now the premium gradient has corrected, too.
I think a home valued at 8K in middle America would be 300K in LA.
Rocky
Natural Gas Price Increases
Last week the natural gas futures were down now they're at their highest in the past six months!!!
To stay on topic, the local Jewel (home) dropped 6 cents to $3.13, the BP by work $down 6 cents to $3.19.
2014 Malibu 2LT, 2015 Cruze 2LT,
87 - $2.979
89 - $3.079
91 - $3.149
93 - $3.179
diesel - $2.819
87 bucks worth of D... surprisingly, the station was rather empty today. Usually packed with trucks.
kcram - Pickups Host
BP, Jewel & Citgo are within 1/2 block of each other near my home, with BP & Citgo directly across from each other. BP & Jewel are each $3.13, Citgo $3.17.
By work the Shell & BP are at $3.19, further up the road the Citgo and Mobil are running $3.17 and $3.19. I wonder why the drop in prices, particularly the BP & Shells.
East Coast still uses the old-style analog pumps, but the total price decimal has been moved one place to the right to allow for those $100+ fill-ups! (And the 2-digit cents indicator has been combined into one, showing 00, 10, 20, etc, with hash marks for 05, 15, 25, etc.)
The Shell near my work is showing $2.79, but they've been completely out of gas for days (all grades) -- wonder what's up with that?
Read this.....
After Katrina, gas prices rose to over $3.25 a gallon in many places.
More in California.
Why?
That crude oil that you pumped into your car at $3.25 or more, was paid for many weeks and months before that at a lower price than what was paid for after Katrina.
The price of gas should have been $3.25 a gallon when you pumped that record high price for crude oil, which would have been months later.
This means that the price of gas after Katrina, should have been about $2.50. (In some places, even lower)
Bush and Cheney know this, as they are oil people.
Yet.....they let it happen.
They stole from you!
And you let them do it!!
Have your say in November.
I am,
George Vreeland Hill
Using max a/c (or recirculate) may save a little gas (probably not measureable) over "regular" (fresh air) a/c.
Sheetz: up to $2.89 for 87, with 93 at $3.19 (30 cents higher).
Hess: down to $2.79, with the usual 10-cent spreads.
Shell: still no gas at all, since this past Sunday at least.
In addition, stations rarely set their pump prices. The call to raise or lower prices usually comes from their distributor (who actually delivers the fuel).
Thankfully, here in NJ, we don't have to deal with the morning price, the afternoon price, and the evening price. State law prohibits fuel price changes more than once per 24 hours.
kcram - Pickups Host
Some stations didn't go up get in an area of price war near us; others rose but I saw they're back down to $3.099 this evening.
The idea that they're charging what it costs to replace what's in their tanks doesn't hold water (gasoline) with me. They raise the price when there's a jump in the speculator's price for crude on the markets; but the price dropped drastically as Chris dwindled and the price doesn't go back down in the same quick fashion. That's what would actually happen if the pricing were truly "what it costs to replace what's in their tank." I know that's the mantra but it doesn't wash with me.
The lack of control on these petroleum businesses by government has my selection of whom I am voting for this November already made.
2014 Malibu 2LT, 2015 Cruze 2LT,
Like a previous poster says, in reality, prices jump on SPECULATION that prices MIGHT go up in the next few weeks.
That's why a hurricane which MIGHT cause refinery delays causes prices to jump. It's all an estimate of future costs, not based on any hard information.
And economists have recently proven that with trend analysis. See this page:
http://www.courier-journal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060801/BUSINESS/6080- 10354/1003
There's another way to fatten your take: Once prices are up, you can keep them there.
An examination of gasoline prices relative to those of oil shows this tendency: Gasoline prices shoot up along with oil's — but sputter down slowly, lagging behind drops in crude prices.
The AP analysis looked at weekly federal pricing data since September 1999. It found that a gallon of retail gasoline rose an average of 6 cents for a 10-cent rise in oil, but dropped only 4 cents for a 10-cent decline in oil — suggesting that gas temporarily resisted downward shifts more strongly than oil.
Economists call the phenomenon "downward sticky" prices. "When costs go down, there's a margin there that people are happy to hold on to as long as they can," says economist Richard Gilbert at the University of California, Berkeley."
If you notice the trend, it's pretty simple. All of the stuf in the news and all of the price swings - it's calculated to get us used to paying $3 a gallon.
Goes up a lot, comes down almost as much, cycle repeats. After a few years, we have yo-yo'ed our way up bit by bit to where we think $3 for gas is normal and shrug it off.
Yet the cost of making it hasn't gone up one bit. And while it's immoral, it's not technically illegal, as there is no price fixing(since the prices aren't actually set between companies) That is, they raise it during the summer and drop 60-70% of that increase during the winter. And they do it because they have a captive audience. We have no option to go elsewhere or to actually stop driving entirely.
Also, surprise of surprises, this old beast is up to about 15.3 mpg! And I have no idea why, unless the thing actually LIKES the heat? :confuse:
Rocky
The move, attributed to a corroded pipeline and a small leak, will take some 400,000 barrels of daily production off the oil markets and is sure to weigh on traders already nervous about geopolitical concerns in the Middle East. The 400,000 barrels equates to about 8% of U.S. production.
Crude-oil futures for September delivery rose to as high as $76.64 a barrel in electronic trading.
I am just glad I retired when I did from there. Just like me that pipe is getting old. They have replaced over 100 miles of it due to the corrosive wear on the steel. Wonder how long this repair will take. It is not easy shutting down. Close to a million barrels a day flow down the 4 foot pipeline. The West coast will be hard hit as they use most of that oil. The oil companies wanted to build a second line going South. It would not pay without ANWR being on line.
The 8% makes it sound more extreme. Good media print.
2014 Malibu 2LT, 2015 Cruze 2LT,