A quick question about gas?

Question

Why is it that my dad filled up his trunk today at $3.75 a gallon. Only to see that later in the day it went up to $3.85 a gallon. Did the gas station buy a new barrel of gas that afternoon that would warrant a raise in cost? Who regulates this behavior? Who can I complain too??.. I am a full time college student that has to travel 50miles a day back and forth to school? and i thought tuition was too expensive...

Answer 1

the gas station owners are reacting to local prices.  other than that...no one knows.  welcome to capitalism.

Answer 2

Its 4.05 in my area CT has the 2nd expensive gas.  CA is first.

Answer 3

You should direct your complaints to the law of supply and demand.  Perhaps the law can be repealed.

Here are a couple of simple but important facts to help you get some perspecitive.  First, gas stations make no money on gas.  They have to sell Beer and cigarettes to survive.  Second, refinery operators don't make a whole lot of profit on refining.  In the springtime, when gas shoots up, they make more, but that's only an extra 5% of sales or so.

The real money is made on Crude oil.  It costs $5 to pump a barrel of crude oil out of a hole in the ground.  Crude oil is WORTH $120 a barrel, but it COSTS $5 a barrel.  In some oil wells, where enhanced oil recovery is done under difficult conditions, it may cost as much as $30 a barrel.  The tar sands oil from Canada costs about $25 a barrel.  Oil is sold on the mercantile exchange for $120.  On average, it probably costs $20, so $100 of that is profit.

Now - obviously, all the major oil companies have some holes in the ground that they own, but they also have to buy oil from other poeple. So their cost for oil, on average, is very unpredictable.  It's a mixture of $5 oil and $120 oil.

Back in the Nixon administration, the government controlled the price of crude oil.  That worked fine until we started importing oil.  The U.S. government cannot control the market price of oil from other countries, and they never will.  When the market price for oil went above the controlled price, the system failed.  They had to remove the controls.

Answer 4

Because people buy more gas in the afternoon rather than morning. Watch how gas prices drop on Tuesday and Wednesday. By Friday they are up for the weekend.

By an electric car....that is about all you can do to complain.

Answer 5

yep, those other answers are right. the price is based on speculation. it goes up about every other day, whether the gas station gets a delivery of gas or not