Holy Price Gouging, Batman!

[elfs]

It's gonna get bad.

[Edit] If you live in the Puget Sound region, consider using and contributing data to the Seattle Gas Prices database website.

Comments

[whipartist.livejournal.com]

Supply and demand. They get their gas from refineries that are offline. They probably won't have much to sell for a while.

[bryceowen.livejournal.com]

There's a difference between "supply and demand" and taking advantage of people in a bad situation.

[whipartist.livejournal.com]

What's the difference?

As far as I know, Stockbridge GA is not in the area of hurricane devastation. It's not like they're selling water for $10/gallon to people who are stuck at the Superdome.

It's probably going to cost that station a lot more to get their next fill of gas.

[casualprofessor.livejournal.com]

It is price gouging. The price of gas on the open market has jumped $0.12/gallon since Katrina. A $3.00 price hike at the station, based on that number, is price-gouging.

[whipartist.livejournal.com]

That's the national average. Don't forget that gas doesn't just come from the gas fairy-- it has to be refined, delivered, etc. If your local refineries are gone, it's not like the gas just magically flows to you from Illinois.

I have no idea if the price is reasonable, but I'm not going to jump to the conclusion that it isn't. I heard from a friend in North Carolina yesterday that their entire city is out of gas. They have none. Their supply chain has been disrupted.

[casualprofessor.livejournal.com]

North Carolinans being out-of-gas is more an artificial situation. The city panicked: fearing that their supply lines were destroyed, a VERY large number of people apparently tried to get gas at the same time. The supply system can't handle that sort of overload.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

And it is (or should be) perfectly legal. If Whipartist is correct, these may be the last dollars that station sees for several weeks at best; those shopowners need whatever money they can wring out of the public to keep their own families fed.

This is economics 101, I'm afraid. The market is a better signaller of the needs of people than any government bureaucracy.

[casualprofessor.livejournal.com]

It is legal, but is it necessary or market-supported? Any shortage might well be marginal.

I'm reminded again of California's rolling black-outs and justification given to the rate-hikes, and the revelation 2 years later that it was due to a energy-broker conspiracy.

[shadowfey.livejournal.com]

Gas gouging is illegal. The fuel market (and, indeed, pretty much all of the energy market in the US) is a very tightly controlled situation; it is not a free market at all.

There'll always be some gougers, some who get caught and some who don't, but there are regulations about the price of gas, and it's only going to go up that dramatically if enough people panic and stay panicked long enough for it to be 'gotten away with'.

In South Dakota, there's a town (I forget the name, now) where the official population is in the double digits. They have /one/ gas station at all accessible by the main highway. I'm sure they have others which the locals use, but the highway one had a price easily 30 cents higher than in 'closer to civilization' areas. Gouging? You bet, but they're not gouging people who live in the area, and they're not likely to get prosecuted for it, because who's going to stick around to make an issue of it?

Yes, the pipelines are down, but this is a matter of - at most - a shortage for weeks, not months, not years. In the long run, the price of gas has no reason to go up due to this.

[kengr]

As I understand it, the problem is that the hurricane knocked out the power to the pumping stations on the pipelines that are how gas *get* to the Atlanta area.

And there's no way in hell to move enough by truck or train.

So until *all* the pumping stations get power back, the pipelines are down and the gas supply amounts to "what we've got is all there is".

[shadowfey.livejournal.com]

The shortages are marginal; it's already been examined. But people are panicking, and panic drives up supply and demand better than anything but an /actual/ shortage.

Not only has Opec pledged to match demand in light of the aftermath of Katrina, but it is ultimately a temporary shortage. While a lot of petroleum product was shipped through New Orleans, it is not the only port in the country (or even on that coast), nor the only refineries, etc.

I imagine the others will be getting a boost to their budgets for production etc, but really, the biggest problem is that people /will/ assume that numbers like '40 per cent of the oil in the US is GOOOOONE' and not realize that it is considered a 'replenishable resource'.

This isn't to make light of the severity of what's happened (to New Orleans et al or to the gasoline). Just - (the gasoline loss) is perceived as a much more severe issue than it is, and that will lead to perception becoming a price 'reality'.

[omahas.livejournal.com]

Exactly. The price hikes are occuring not because of the limit in supply, but because of a fear that a limit will occur in the near future.

And in answer to Elf's comment about the owners of the gas pumps needing to eek out that last little penny to make sure that their families are fed, I say this: While their families are fed, we non-gas pump owners have paid two to three times more in gas than before, which means that that money doesn't go to feeding our families. Further, if the gas is limited, then we are stuck at home with no way to get to work and be paid, so we've lost that avenue of money too...but we have no way to increase our income quoto over the short term like they do to compensate so that our families will get fed too. So why is it fair that their families get fed and ours don't?

[jenkitty.livejournal.com]

Ahh, Stockbridge. Atlanta area, but kinda out in the boonies.

Georgia governor Sonny Perdue has already issued an executive order basically stating that anybody who engages in price gouging is going to have their ass kicked to Mars. This will be curbed shortly. This does, however, mesh with the reports I'm getting from my ex, who still lives in the area. The gasoline sold in Atlanta is brought into a town called Doraville, on the north side of the metro area (I've seen those tanks, they're huge), from the Gulf coast. Some of the pumps are without power, but the flow was only disrupted for two days, from the reports I've read. Atlanta's getting gasoline again. This should be curbed by the weekend. The problem, of course, is finding all the gougers.