On Thu, 1 Sep 2005 jon@dakota-truck.net wrote:
>
> prices. The gas in the tanks cost a certain amount of money to produce
> and bring to market. IMHO, there is no reason to change the price on
> that gas unless a new delivery has just arrived at a different price.
> Well, actually there *is* a reason to do it, and it has to do with
> price fixing and profiteering. What I would love to see is the
> creation of a gas company whose focus is running lean and pricing
> the gas at their stations in this way. They would almost certainly
> always have lower prices than their competitors, and in the current
> climate, would no doubt quickly attract a loyal customer base. Assuming
There's really no way that would work unless you had massive storage
availbile. Fuel really *is* a commodity: it's always needed, and you need
to price it at current market prices to make any money, or even stay in
business. Everyone always uses the example of filling the tanks on monday
and a price spike on tuesday with the next delivery a week away... Yeah,
that does happen but it goes the other way too - if the delivery is
mid-spike, they end up having to sell it for LESS than they paid too. Now
don't get me wrong, I think the spikes are artificially high and the drops
are slower than they would be in an actually free market, but it's just
not that simple.
If your hypothetical fuel company had to "fill up" today, and market
prices dropped next week so everyone else was underselling, have fun
sitting on that most-expensive-gas-in-town for the next month or two,
until the next BIG spike......
-- MikeM
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sat Oct 01 2005 - 12:50:23 EDT