[Dr. Sivana]

All the steps in the middle

Those steps have always been there. But the price wasn’t always this high relative to other things. Perhaps a consolidation in buyers/distributors has led to recent collusion?

[discostu]

Everything feeds into everything. As gas gets more expensive everything that needs gas to move gets more expensive. As labor gets more expensive everything that involves labor get more expensive. And the tariffs don’t help the math, when the competition gets more expensive everybody is free to up the price of domestic and increase their profit margin. You can see that in diesel, as the price of gas goes up so does the price of diesel, even though the things that make gas more expensive frequently have no impact on the diesel supply, but the “competition” is more expensive, so there you go.