Mighty Bargain Hunter

Feel like a frog being slowly boiled?

August 7th, 2006 | by mbhunter |

Maybe you’ve heard this before: Throw a frog in a pot of water. If you turn the heat up on the water quickly, the frog will sense the temperature change and jump out of the pot. But if you raise the temperature slowly, the frog won’t notice until it’s cooked. (Then it won’t care, but that’s not the point.)

Seems like a good analogy to make with gas prices, doesn’t it?

Gas prices haven’t jumped dramatically since Katrina. But they’ve crept up from the low $2 range to the high $2 range. Gas has been between $2.70 and $2.90 for most of the summer. People are simmering about it, but most are coping now.

We let the gas get a little low in our Town and Country. It cost us over $47 to fill it up. I imagine it won’t be long before the same fill-up will cost $50. Or $60.

The heat may be turned up on us soon, and we’ll notice. We’ll try to jump out of the pot, but we’ll hit the lid and go right back in because we need to get to work. BP needs to shut down half of its North Slope production to fix severe corrosion in an oil transit line. That’s 400,000 barrels a day, or 2.6% of US supply, with imports, gone for a while. The article linked above suggests that we could see $85 oil as a result of this decreased production, but at least we can use that 400,000 barrels a day later.  As of the time of this post, oil’s up over a buck to $75.90.
I’d gas up your vehicles while the water’s not quite so hot.