Replies

Every gas station in my area is charging exactly the same price. To the cent. About 40 gas stations. Hell of a coincidence.

That's pure unadulterated BS. Where do you live? If true, we'll look it up here: gasbuddy.com or here: gaspricewatch.com and verify that.

Here's one : Muncie. A whole penny of difference between all of the stations. And most raised it at about 7:30 AM. All at about the same time.

Muncie

Gee, I wonder how they all knew to raise the price? I watched it happen. But that's not collusion. It's just coincidence.

I'm sure the info will change, so at the time I'm posting this, every station in town is $2.85 or $2.84, and the one that's $2.79 was recorded as the big coincidence was happening.

He's missing a few things.

1) Joe's Gas Shack is charging $2.50/gallon of gas. Down the street, Jack's Gas Shack is charging $2.55/gallon. Joe's next shipment is coming in. He knows that the price is going up. So, to spread the cost increase thinner, he bumps his gas price to meet the $2.55 that Jack is charging. Granted, in the short-term, he's going to make a few dollars more. But, down the road, he doesn't have to raise his prices to $2.56/gallon and be less competitive.

2) BP knows the prices for each station they have in a district. They know the Exxon stations just dropped prices $.05/gallon. They also know that it will affect the purchasing of some of their customers. They take the bite and call the stations and tell them to drop prices $.05/gallon to compete.

3) Sheetz comes to town. They open their new station, and to get people in the door, they open with a major loss leader, their gas. So, while everyone else is charging $2.50/gallon, Sheetz comes in and charges $2.19/gallon. All the nearby stations know they can't compete with that cost, so they drop their prices either to $2.19/gallon or as close as they can. The ripple works out to about a 7 mile radius. Eventually, Sheetz stops with the loss leader pricing and the market levels back out at somewhere around $2.45/gallon.

Price wars happen in the gas market.
Pricing does get influenced by the distributor.
The free market DOES work.

Somewhere, he forgot about the simple concept called economics.

Paul