Gas prices up
 

I thought I would let everyone know that gas in the Charlotte, NC area went up as much as $.50 a gallon over night. Stations that were 3.699 last night were 4.199 today and I heard one person today say that it might be $5.00 or more per gallon by tomorrow. The local stations are also limiting gas sales to 10 gal per sale because of supply. I don't know if this is going to be a national trend or not, but if gas hasn't gone up where you live you might want to go fill up.

What's the cause? Ike? I don't watch the news, :p

Its over 5.00 already over here.

Hurricane. They're rationing the gas until its blowing through, so gas shot up a whole lot. By midnight Its supposed to be near 6 bucks a gallon.

Looking at Charlotte area stations on GasBuddy.com - Find Low Gas Prices in the USA and Canada it looks like all the Shell stations raised it up to $4.29 and neighboring stations followed suit. However, there are still plenty of Exxon, Texaco and Hess stations at $3.65 or less (for now).

Upon further review it looks like suburban stations are around the $4.29 mark, but it's cheaper the closer you get to downtown.

Yeah, hurricane threatening extraction and refining operations in the gulf plus speculators (which have been officially blamed for the oil price inflation) make for higher costings. Prices haven't spiked here in Cali yet but I'm sure we'll feel it soon enough. Regular was $3.85 this morning at my usual.

This is interesting: the US gas "temperature" map

Charlotte Gas Prices

I live on the illinois/indiana border, and so far the prices have skyrocketed in IN.

In evansville, IN, they've gone crazy with the rationing. Its over 5 bucks a gallon in Evansville, and its over 5 I carbondale IL (I think its carbondale, its one of the C towns).

its near 4.50 here, and rising by the hour, and the local Casey's has ran out of gas. Once the gas stations run out they aren't getting anymore till this blows through. So watch out.

The only place that isn't rationing here is Marathon. They don't think they'll run out before it blows over, they are pretty sure of themselves not running out.

I live RIGHT in the place in Illinois Where the RED is centered. Right on the border of Indiana.

If you want to know how close to the border I live, Theres an East side of town that is actually Mt. Carmel, IN, the western side is Mt. Carmel, IL.

I live in a town 9 miles from Mt. Carmel, and the border is the river which cuts Indiana and IL apart.

As we all know it doesn't have to be a reason anymore for gas to go up they just make up excuses. I think Ike is the excuse they are using this time. I just heard on the news that some stations in the Carolina's have gone up as much as $1.00 gallon in the past 24 hours.

The prices listed there were pretty accurate as of last night.

^

lol, well they certainly aren't accurate as of now. They're raising here every hour.

Well europe is finally getting their laugh now haha.

This is a replay of Kartrina. Well I worked a day before Katrina hit at my dad's gas station (you know, the day gas went up every hour). Well people were dumb enough to fill-up all of their vehicles (even thought they weren't going to use all of the fuel) making an already low supply (no new deliveries were being made) worse by adding to the demand. Then when deliveries started back up and prices came back down, people didn't buy fuel since they had already done so a couple of days ago for about $4.00 a gallon.

What I'm saying is that, don't fill-up your tanks if you think you can hold out for a week and a half or so.

here in Arkansas, the governor has declared a state of emergency. apparently a main gas line into arkansas has been turned off until the hurricane passes. prices went up about $1.00 per gallon today. a panicked city of 75,000 dried up a couple gas stations here. other cities are at $5.00+ a gallon and limiting how much you can get.

some areas haven't changed at all.

you'd swear the dang hurricane is hitting us by the way people are acting. stupid sheep :mad:

i'm glad i fill up on Mondays or tuesdays.......

One of the local news stations reported tonight that some stations in the Carolina's have raised prices as much as $1. a gallon in the past 24 hours. The news station also reported that they had contacted our local congressman and he said he has filed the federal paperwork on a price gouging investigation.

WoW! Guess I'm lucky!

Look at the last comment in my fuel log: "Couldn't pass up $3.41 gas...!"

LoL! I haven't been out of the house in the last 24 hrs.

I guess I should go see how much 'damage' Ike has done around here!

OMG, local news is showing how many local gas station are bone dry. Also the pipeline may be back up by Monday (best case scenario) but even if it takes until Friday of next week, most people have enough fuel to make it till then. If they don't they have to make it work instead of increasing demand. Sacrificing those trips to the theater or whatever should be obvious in time of crisis.

Strange that this didn't happen last time the gulf was off line during the RNC.

Oh well I'm good on fuel for another 3~4 weeks. Hopefully Bio will be online by then.

This is just a classic case of mass hysteria. Some guy in southern Illinois starts a rumour by sending an email to his friends, who send it to their friends, etc. A certain fraction believe the rumour, and rush out to fill their tanks. Gas station operators see the long lines (and maybe got the emails too), so they figure they'd better raise prices. That lends credence to the rumour, so more people panic and rush out to fill up, raising prices still further - and probably emptying some gas station tanks.

Interesting story from the apparent epicenter here: :: TheSouthern.com - Southern Illinois' Homepage ::

Especially interesting is the comment about halfway down, by a person who passes by a station selling at $3.69, pulls in to one down the street selling at $3.99 and fills up there, then goes back to see the other station still at $3.69 - and has the gall to complain about the station, instead of just kicking herself for her own stupidity.

What I'd really like to know is, after the storm has passed, and there is little or no damage, do we get a rebate for all the money they "stole" from us? I highly doubt it! I wish I could gouge money out of everyone whenever I MIGHT get hit by a storm...... of course I'd give it back if I found it wasn't needed! :D

Thats pretty much what happened.

Everywhere people were talking about the emails they got and people were freaking out. I never knew it actually started near ground zero.

Well, I'm just gonna ride it out until the prices come back down. shouldn't be too long.

Yup same thing happened at my school. The gas station that is across the street called the school up and told the person who answered to spread the word like a wildfire. I tried to stop people from going out and biting into this but when I pulled out of the parking lot I saw a huge line consisting of people from my high school. :(

Guess I should have filled up last night on the way back like I usually do. Im about 400 miles into this tank. I havent seen any drastic increases, just the same BS all summer. Crude goes down, prices start to go down, then they shoot the prices back up to $4 overnight. I think what theyre trying to do is establish a new baseline. At least the other day crude was getting down to almost $100 again, havent checked lately. Crude goes down to $70 and theyll still hold gas at $4. Then when it goes back up to $140 like it was, theyll raise gas to $8 and say thats the reason. At least one thing is for sure, we cant blame the oil producers for keeping the prices up.

Who can we blame? My dad was kind of excited about seeing the price almost to two digits ($99.xx) but then when we got the next delivery somehow the company charged us .25 cents more per gallon. There is no way for the gas stations to bring the price down even though the crude price is at a decent spot. Right now, when half of the gas stations in the area are out of fuel, the station is making .09 cents per gallon. :(

I don't know who exactly is making the money, could you answer that question for me (not being sarcastic)?

Now how do you get "stole" and "gouged" out of this? It's their gas: they have a right to try to sell it for whatever the market will bear. (It's not like they're located on evacuation routes out of Galveston.) Indeed, if you look at this from a different angle, you see that the ones doing the "gouging" are really all the people who rushed out to fill up when they didn't need to, thinking they were going to take advantage of gas station owners who were slow in raising prices.

Remember the first principle of the successful con man: never try to con an honest person. Instead, find the dishonest ones and convince them that they've got an opportunity to cheat you.

Exactly! Theres no such thing as gauging. Only suckers willing to pay the price.

Yep, I live in the Raleigh area and gas wet up from 3.69 to as high as 4.07 overnight, although i could still find some 3.79 stations. One station asked drivers to only put 10 gallons in their cars because of the gas shortage in the southeast. That's the first I had heard of that.

No, speculators are not the cause of this price hike. And they have not been "officially" blamed for any other price increases anyway - only conjecturally blamed as a convenient scapegoat. (Can't be blaming the weak dollar or the oil companies, can we? That might look bad for the administration).

The price of oil has dropped steadily over the past few days and was under $100/barrel for a while yesterday (Friday). So there is clearly no correlation between the high pump prices today and the price of crude oil today because the price of crude has DROPPED since the price of gas was 3.69, not risen. This is clearly in anticipation of IKE and an opportunity for the oil companies to make a few extra hundred million dollars on that gas already in the ground at stations.

Wow, what an amazing phenomenon. But it's a warning as to the possibilities when there really is a shortage.

I ventured out of my cave today (in Arizona)...

Gasoline is still $3.419 @ QT -- $3.339 @ ARCO, if you don't mind coating all your sensors with phosphorus. ;)

A lot of it is hysteria.

A lot of it is taxes. Note on the US "temperature" map the colors forentire states tend to be similar. Every state taxes gas and diesel differently.

If New Source Review had not been such a mad-dog government program for the last thirty years the US might have built some refineries away from the Gulf Coast. We'll never know for sure because simply building a refinery anywhere is nearly impossible. So about a third of all hurricanes take out some infrastructure. There is no redundancy anymore so a third of the hurricanes disrupt production/refining and since there is no slack the fear of shortages drives up local prices.

Maybe the hysteria isn't all that hysterical. A forgotten hurricane - Ivan - played hob with the production/refining system a few years back. I think a lot of people know in their gutthat there is no redundancy and look out for #1.

Drove past the usual stations in Carson City (Nevada) this afternoon, and they were pretty much the same price they were last week when I filled up - $3.60-something at the cheap/convenient station I usually go to. Will probably be another 2-3 weeks before I have to fill up the Insight's tank again, and put in a whole 9.5 gallons :-)

But you know, there's another question here. How many of those people could possibly have been unaware of the fact that Ike was coming; that it would almost certainly shut down some refinery operations; and that based on past experience, the price of gas would probably spike as a result? So why the heck didn't all these people fill their tanks a few days ago, when prices were at their lowest? Instead they wait until they jump, panic, then complain about price gouging, when (in my politically-incorrect opinion) they'd to better to be taking their brains back to the dealer for some badly-needed warranty work :-)

why is gas higher in states NOT effected by any current natural disasters? From Michigan to straight down to florida. Doesn't really make sense to me. If gas spikes 4+ here near cleveland ohio, i am screwed. I gas up every 3 days, and i have 1/2 tank[6~8 gal.] I might be able to make it to Tuesday

$3.38 for reg. plus my preferred shopper's discount = $3.23.

Can anyone explain how diesel is cheaper though?

For the past 3 or 4 days, I've seen diesel at least 10 to 20 cents cheaper than gasoline.

Yeah, I believe it was the administration that hung the blame on the last price hike on speculators. Go figure! And by "official", it was released through the press circuits (since I heard it through NPR)

Gas price spikes have a lot of factors, predominantly geography and distance from refineries and take into account local or regional price additives (as those in California). Once upon a time, Alaska was the most expensive but I guess that's out the door with the panic pricing. Nothing new there -- I see it as a free market system in effect.

Hiya,

The previous tank, I paid $3.419, and the tank today was $3.709; a 29 cent jump in less than a week.

I realize the little guys who run the stations only make like a penny per gallon profit. They make a lot more off other things in the store. Im talking about the gasoline companies. Theyre the ones in the chain that buy the crude at $100 a barrel instead of $145 and still sell the gas they make for the same. The Saudis and whoever else we import the crude from have lowered their prices considerably. Its windfall profits for the gasoline companies. And unfortunately thats just the way business works when theres no real competition. Most places today were $4.299 for 87 octane.

What!?

I don't know what it is, but how come IL has gas prices over 4 bucks and many near 5, but we're no where near affected by the hurricane? AZ is much closer to Texas.

Prices dropping back to their norms at around 3.90 something here now. I just wish they'd go down.

I drove by a sign on I-95 south of Richmond yesterday and swore it was a mistake...large LCD billboard advertising gas at $4.999 and diesel at $4.059, I thought that they had swapped prices and that they were a bit high for the region (higher than I would have considered paying). I even noted some "East Coast" brand stations yesterday that appeared to have run out or quit selling gasoline as their pumps were off and no fuel price was advertised.

Then I go to GasBuddy and check out their Richmond gas prices web site. HOLY CRAP the market schizophrenia is unbelievable.

Regular gasoline ranges from $3.49 to $4.49 (not sure what happened to $4.99?) and diesel ranges from $3.88 to $4.69.

It seems that most of the pricing is toward the lower end of the range (don't have full data available to analyze) as there's more large jumps within the highest-priced 15 stations than there is within the lowest-priced 15 stations.

There must be some hurricane-related fallout as that's the only thing that can explain refined product price volatility like this. It isn't as pronounced as after Katrina (I had to drive from GA to SW-VA within a week after Katrina and almost had to stay the night in Charlotte because an open gas station was a RARE find) so it probably won't last as long or affect as many consumers. I do believe that some (not all) supply chains are affected temporarily and that might be why some places have either shut down or jacked prices but not others.

There was a station here in Atlanta area who jumped the price to $5.25 / gas.
within the hour the news crews where there broadcasting about the price jump - Gov Perdue re-enacted his post-Katrina "Price Gouging" checks - "Promising" to punish any stations who are overcharging customers and feeding the hysteria.

Within the hour the station changed price back to $4.25.

Supply and demand does work - but when some individuals try to capatolize on the hysteria and make a quick buck - then people are raked over the coals.

It is true though - it does take 2 people for a con to work - the guy raising the price to $5.25 and the guy who still stops to fill up there.

( i got gas for $3.55 2 days before. so i am good for the month)