My Problem With Gas

I got to tell you, I'm excited. You'll never guess what I discovered this morning. A local gas station selling gas...you better sit down, this is fantastic...selling gas at a giveaway price. I mean, this station has gasoline at the rock bottom price of $2.879 a gallon. How can they do that? I felt like I should have been holding a gun on the guy while I was pumping the precious fluid into my tank.
All seriousness aside, these fuel folks really have a neat little gimmick going on.
From those oil-producing countries in the Middle East to the guy who runs the local convenience store...it's all a gimmick. Yeah, I know, the guys who own the gas stations say they're only making about a penny a gallon. Well, if that's so, then how can they have their Terrific Tuesday promotions when they reduce gasoline by five cents a gallon? I guess they're taking a loss on each gallon. Or, how can they give away a car wash or a cup of coffee with a fill-up?
Caught you money-grubbing greedy commercialists, didn't I? Yep. You can fool some of the people all of the time, and you can fool all of the people some of the time, but you can't fool Abraham Lincoln.
I'm back to the gas-buying habits of my high school days. I only buy about 2 gallons at a time. Back in the late sixties, I'd pull into a service station and tell the guy to fill it up or one dollar's worth, whichever came first.
I was pumping a couple of gallons into my 1995 Saturn the other day when it dawned on me just what a gimmick these gas station folks have. There was a big sign at the pump that advertised cigarettes at $25.95 a carton. In other words, whatever your addictions are, the guy at the local convenience store is there to "help," from gasoline to beer and cigarettes to the lottery.
And, yet the way they plead poverty, they have you feeling that you maybe should start some sort of telethon for them. Don't fall for it. These people are bleeding us dry.
Think about this. Why is it that one day a particular station will have the lowest prices in town and a couple of days later they're ten to twenty cents higher than the other stations around? Then it will flip-flop and a station that was low will have high prices. I figure they all kinda work together. You know they all agree on who will jack up the prices this week.
And now, down in Hampton Roads anyway, they have a new little trick up their sleeves...fake gasoline outages. I know that little game. Yesterday they shut down several gas stations in that area because they were "out of gas." What they're doing is trying to scare us. These gas guys are smart. They know that if we go a couple of days without any gas, we'll thank them for selling it to us for more than three bucks a gallon. These fuel people are so convinced that we're so dependent on gasoline that we'll pay anything. They are convinced that despite grumblings and protests and threats of boycotting, that we'll keep on buying their fuel. They're as confident as are the drug pushers who keep satisfying the sick needs of their clients. They believe we are just going to keep on needing a fix regardless of what it costs.
And here's the really sad thing about this whole mess...they're right.