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

[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.