f13.net

Just another guy who needs to get shot in the face.

See, video games really do cause crime.

Hmm. The AMA better get crackin', I smell a new 'syndrome' to be treated with some questionable drug with horrid side effects!

  Our station is at 3.14 a gallon, and last time I went out to change the sign, I got yelled at. Told my pops I'll need a flak jacket next time I go out. (Hope not) 

 That said, we've had 0 drive offs, but then, we pump all the gas so we have an advantage over your convenience store drive offs.

I don't understand how gas is priced. Why are the prices being hiked, when the gas in the tanks (at the station) was bought at a certain price? Shouldn't you hike the prices when you refill the station's tanks, to reflect that you paid more? A station that filled their tanks with (consumer priced) $2.25 gas a couple weeks ago is just making bank off raised prices that haven't affected them yet (until they have to refill the tanks at the higher premium).

Please explain. I feel this is about to become a very big issue.

Some folks would call it capitalism, while others would call it gouging.

The thing you have to realize is that things are priced according to what people will pay for them, not by how much it cost the provider/manufacturer.

What I don't understand is how oil or gas is distributed.  I am told there are two pipelines into Georgia, for example.  If this is true, I suppose there is a refinery somewhere in Georgia that adds Techron to Chevron gas and another that adds urine to RaceTrac gas.  So how do they know who gets what oil?  The whole thing's a racket, I tell ya.  L. Ron was right.

The pipeline just ships the stuff. The refinery is where the cat piss or Techron get added.

I suppose you were saying that everybody puts their oil into the same bucket, pipes it to the boonies, and then takes out their share on the other end, using a complex system of abacii and cockpunches to track how much everyone gets.

Oil gets shipped to the refineries. Refineries then refine the stuff into petroleum, natural gas, gasoline, and whatever else you refine that sweet, sweet crude into. That product can then get shipped via tanker, truck, or pipeline to wherever it needs to go. I'm sure the finished product like gasoline doesn't end up in the pipeline so much as get dumped to a truck.

But I'm no expert, I've just worked with some limited PR for a major oil company.

I just want to know if Exxon's oil comes from the same tanker as, say, Shell or Sunoco or Citgo.  Sort of the way your electicity comes from one place no matter who is selling it.  I am probably showing my inability to properly handle my native language instead of succinctly asking my question.  I mean, is the same group of Illuminatti getting the money no matter what brand I buy?  And furthermore, that negates any criticism of OPEC since it doesn't matter what your source of black gold is.  You know:  :cthulu:

I'm curious since people like to blame OPEC for high prices when everybody knows we get oil from many other places.  If BP (presumably North Sea oil) raises price-per-barrel due to OPEC's lowest-common-denominator, shouldn't I hate them too?  Especially since the god-damned BP is out of fuel. Gah!

Thanks for making me use a smiley.  Now I have to bathe.

(http://images.amazon.com/images/P/074325337X.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg) (http://www.newamericancentury.org/)

The color scheme font on that book cover is annoying the shit out of me.

Few things crack me up more than hearing an administration official re-commit to Supply & Demand market forces and then in the next breath assure us they're prosecuting gougers.

Right. Considering that we put approximately the cost of a couple house purchases (That would be cash up front for the house, whole bill) in the ground, and making pennies per gallon profit, I'm not sorry. Yeah we have to be able to afford the next load of gas and eat too. Amazing shit. It's not like 3.14 goes into my fucking pocket. And only a station that has 0 business would still hold gas in the tanks from a couple weeks ago.  We try very hard to hold off on raising prices at our station till we need to. We're also the highest priced in town, because we enjoy having food on the fucking plate. These fece flinging cock monkeys out here don't make diddly squat on their gas, and are constantly bitching about not having any money. Because they're fucking stupid.

Gas stations don't make shit when the price goes up. When it comes down is where they make the cash because they are generally slow to follow it. So when the price goes up out here, we follow it, make our percentage, and follow it back down. We can afford to do that. With the added bonus that if fucks all the bandits out here who really are gouging. Christ we were lower than AM/PM (which is really shitty gas by the way)  by over 25 cents for two weeks and the stupid cattle didn't notice. Dumbasses still filling up at their regular hole, because they can't be bothered to read a fucking sign. 


Yeah, you hit a nerve sorry. I realize you don't understand it, and I didn't want this to sound angry at you, but for a moment you took the mask of every fucker that blames me for the price at the pump. I've been bitched at every day for the past oh...4 years about gas going up. So yeah, I'm tired of it. Hope this gives you a small clue about the pricing at the station. Watch when gas comes down and watch the fuckers who don't. Those are the assholes.

I was just curious. Thanks for biting my head off, maybe if it's so bad you should seek other employment.

At least you're honest.

I'm sure this will make gas station owners look so much better when I post it to the librarians that were curious about how gas pricing worked. Want to rewrite it so you don't sound like a total douchebag?

I knew that gas is generally sold at the pumps for little to no profit because the money is made in the high priced in store 'convenience' purchases.  However, there has absolutely been some attempts at profit taking this last week or so by unscrupulous station owners so play high-and-mighty-small-business-man-just-trying-to-feed-his-family all you want, it doesn't change the fact that there are people taking advantage and half a dozens investigations have been launched by Charlie Christ (Florida Attny Gen.).

Macro/micro fallacy, bleh.

No, I'm happy with it. If you took the post and thats the only thing you could find that explained the pricing, then I can't help you anyway.

I have to agree, AM/PM is shitty gas. Friends don't let friends fill up at AM/PM.

Shell Premium for me.


.....It's also the only decent station I pass on my way to school/work.

Now is that Shell premium for you or for mom/dad's gas card?

It's for me.

(http://strazos.4tehwin.org/wp-images/scan.jpg)

Bitch.

I'll tell a little story on why that is one of my favorite jokes thought. So my brother-in-law and his wife are both aspiring actors. They live in Orlando - So go say hi to Patrick - one of the hosts at FEAR FACTOR LIVE. Anyways - we had taken him out to dinner two days in a row and so they took us to dinner and were mentioning how this was the first month they were going to be totally mom and dad support free. Then he added, "well - other then all the gas I have bought this month driving around to visit you two that I put on dad's card." So we continue eating dinner, they offer to pick up the tab, and my wife says, "I don't think they take dad's gas card here Patrick."

So - I confess I wanted to use it. It really didnt have the same delivery. But your scanning it in...That was a nice touch.

I come crawling back to mom and dad from to time, I admit. I'm also an aspiring actor...Go figure.

"Patrick" has an OK gig though (Universal Theme Park, I'm guessing?). What's his excuse?

Hold everything now Strazos....You have "elements of dance" on your powerpoint resume...

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&ct=res&cd=2&url=http%3A//users.rowan.edu/%7Eastill71/Downloads/resume/Resume.ppt&ei=Yf8hQ6agA6K6YOWnsecE

They have expensive tastes?

.....Yeah.


I only took it because, 1) A hot female friend wanted me to take it with her, 2) I needed credits to pad my schedule with, and 3) I needed a class to balence out my writting-intensive classes.

Oddly enough, the class was about a 50/50 split between guys and girls, with most of the guys being football players (I have no idea why there were so many of them).

I've taken an elective in a bunch of different Fine and Performing Arts classes, usually just to pad the schedule.



Also, that thing is old as hell.

Like what? Gasoline?

Hey look! The thread has gone full circle.

The tab was sitting around from when we were going on about different gas prices in our area. I never pay for gas in cash, so I have a shitton of these around.

I figured that from Unreal and the skeleton head or whatever that was. It really wasn't fair to use that as a target. Now I feel bad. Sorry.

Why premium? No cars are designed to use it - Mid should work fine.

Heh, everything on that "site" is from a class I took my sophomore year....again, to pad my schedule.


And I do premium because of the car I drive.....I suppose I COULD use medium....but there Might be an added benefit to the $.08 more expensive flavor, so why not. If I was driving a V8 still, or even a supercharged V8, there wouldn't be a question.

EDIT: Wow, just looked at my old PP thing....that's just embarassing. I need to take that whole thing down.

Excellent idea - but you really should leave it up for a week so I don't have to change the link to a good cache of the page.

School servers were acting wonky, so I couldn't move the files around.

They got deleted instead.

 Totally agree. The only advantage premium (at least Shell, and Texaco before that) has is more cleaners. The only type of car that I have seen that regularly requires premium are some of the mid to late 90s Nissans. They seem to be pretty damn picky about the gas.

As an afterthought, isn't fuel in FL expensive?

The only gas station owners I vilify are the assholes who will and do gouge, and yes, there are plenty of them out there.

No, the real cocksuckers in the gas/oil game are the suppliers (the shitheels who pay people to dig it out of the ground) like OPEC and the distributors (who are the ones really setting the prices). The retail sellers? They are paying mostly for the summer homes of the first two in the chain.

And from what I understand about the oil industry, some grades of oil are not suitable for gasoline production or are lower quality, which is why you have different prices for oil based on where it's dug up.

  Gas is also shipped in water blocks   [water]gas[water].  Higher quality fuel comes from the portion furthest from the water. Which is why you may occasionally hear people bitching about their car running like shit because they didn't want to pay the extra 4 cents a gallon to buy a decent quality fuel.

 Useless anecdote follows.

 Guy got towed in one weekend. Car would turn over, but not start. Did routine tests found his fuel pump was bad. In the course of replacing the pump, come to find out he had replaced fuel pumps in his two other vehicles as well. All of them were less than five years old. As he babbled on further and noticed our sign board with the price of our fuel, (Texaco at the time, Shell now. I miss Texaco.) he mentioned that after searching low and high, he had found the lowest priced gas in all of Seattle. He left still not being able to wrap his brain around the fact that he'd be saving himself money by buying better fuel. Some people you just can't reach.

I took a dance class or two, and I did it because it was required for my major.  Mostly girls.  It was cool.


You should watch football sometime, it's an interesting sport.  At my school, we weren't allowed to mingle with the athletes.  That was probably for the best.

My truck still rolls around while I feed it 87 octane.  15.5 mpg sucks balls.  On the positive side, prices have stabilized at something like $2.78 for the low-end flavors at places like QuikTrip and RaceTrac and presumably Sam's Club.  This will change once the gas tax is reimplemented, but I can't worry about it since I can't stockpile fuel.

No, I meant that I don't know why there were that many football players in my particular section. There were about 10-12 guys, with 8-9 being football players.

No.  It's really not.

Word.

My joke is buried under your joke now.  Happy?

Since this started about gas - be happy with your prices my American friends. Gas in Vancouver today, in USD, = $3.85 a gallon.

Most stations go up on down on the same kind of schedule, you just need to pay attention to the patterns. Never wait to fill up after work heading in to a long weekend. Late at night on Sundays I can usually get my gas for about $.10/litre less than it will be on Monday morning.

Might be, if I were joking.

The Wife is the Football fan in my family.  It makes being a Scottish Male, er, uncomfortable at times...

Try being a Texas Male with no interest in televised sports in a state where the women quote better stats than most hardcore male enthusiasts.

(http://dvdmedia.ign.com/dvd/image/ANIMAL_HOUSE-5.jpg)

I feel for you guys.  I suppose I am exceptionally talented at ignoring things I don't want to see or hear.  When my wife is watching football, chances are that my mind is in a completely different time zone than my body.

Heh, back on topic - Gas Prices at the Station:

This is info I've gleaned from working with clients who own convience stores or chains.  I'm not 100% sure this is universal, or if it's just the arrangement some distributors have.

Gas is delivered regularly at the store.  Gas is tracked at the pump.  The supplier bills the store regularly (every couple weeks or every month) for sales at the pump using some kind of weighted average price,  as sales happen and with fully updated cost information.  The supplier also caclulates the various state and federal sales, excise, and highway use taxes,  and will forward payments to the appropriate state/federal government.

The gas in the ground isn't actually the property of the station owner.  It's more like inventory held in consignment.  This means that bumps in gas costs show up almost immediately for station owners.

Since most operations now run on a "Just in Time" inventory/supply system,  this means large increases in the price of gas are reflected almost immediately in the cost of gas to the station owner.  Since Katrina fucked up so many refineries, it caused serious Short Term crimps in the system.

Haemish is right,  the gouging really only takes place when the station owner is slow to move their prices down.  I would imagine in most cases this pretty much offsets losses station owners take in the lag between the price hikes in the cost of supply vs. sales to the final consumer when costs are increasing.  Price gouging when prices are declining should only be a problem where there are very few competitors.

The benefits in the "Just in Time" system are that distributors don't need to maintain as many of the large tank farms to hold a few weeks supplies.  With comparable environmental benefits (less gas sitting in old and rusting tanks, causing potential environmental remediation lawsuits) and less loss of inventory,  also less need for large amounts of cash tied up in security deposits and what not.

Again, I'm not 100% on this.  I quite frankly never had too much desire to learn about the nuances of the petroleum supply business....

There's no such thing as "gouging" in a true supply/demand market.  Only rational and irrational pricing.

I'd green-text the above but a bunch of rainbow-lovers had to go and ruin a good thing... ;-)

 To be honest I have no idea how outfits like AM/PM work, this may very well be the case. For small family outfits like mine, that are owned, not franchises, it happens differently. The supplier faxes us on a daily basis what the price of fuel is. When we get a drop, we get charged whatever the rate is at the time of the drop.   I do find it absolutely amazing that we almost always seem to get a drop right after the price goes up, and right before they go down. This costs us literally thousands of dollars when prices do the roller coaster thing they have going now. The only way to make this up is by running a convenience store on the side, or like we do, have a shop attached.