Buy gas NOW
September 2nd, 2005 | by mbhunter |There was an e-mail circulating around (and posted on the Freakonomics blog) telling people not to buy gas yesterday.
That website’s take was that it wouldn’t make much impact to not buy gas yesterday. Quite the contrary: looking at how things are unfolding, now is a very good time to buy as much gas as you can.
I suggested this to my wife as she was leaving Wal-Mart today. She gassed up for $2.99/gallon AND filled up our portable gas cans. On the way home from work I saw that the gas stations had increased their prices to $3.19/gallon — up another 20 cents. Other stations in the county will have to follow. She went back into Wal-Mart to look for more gas cans — only the 1-gallon cans were left. I imagine those will be gone soon.
My take: Most gas stations are not raising the prices 20 cents a day just to gouge people. They are trying not to run out. They are trying to curb demand by raising the price. Competing gas stations cannot afford to have lower prices than their competitors in this environment. They’d be pumped dry in a matter of hours.
The Gulf of Mexico accounts for about a third of domestic oil production. Lots of that production capacity was severely damaged over the past few days. That isn’t going to be repaired soon.
Don’t try to “sock it to the oil companies.” Keep your tanks as full as you can. Supplies are tight and probably will get tighter before they get looser.
