[TheForge] OT--Gas prices, gas shortages, price gouging?

[Jim Beard]

We haven't had any run on gas out in Oregon.  We've been staying
around 3.75-3.80 a gallon for a while.

Jim
Drain, OR

On Fri, Sep 12, 2008 at 9:56 AM, Jonathan Barnhart <blakkpawss at yahoo.com> wrote:
> So, yesterday, in the tri-state area I live, the gas stations were told by their parent companies to raise gas prices 20-30 cents a gallon.  This was mainly due to the refineries shutting down for the incoming hurricane in Texas.
>
> Simultaneously some naer do wells decided to start rumors that the gas price, which had been anywhere between $3.40-$3.75 a gallon, would be going up to $5.00 overnight and possibly higher in the next week.  Several of these no goods also rumored that we would shortly run out of gas with no new shipments in the forseeable future.  This lead to a panic which caused people to run out to fill their tanks.  A lot of the rumors sited things like the 911 crisis and hurricane Katrina as examples of what would happen, since we experienced higher prices and some mild shortages then.  They also were saying that for some reason or another(I heard several and none of them really made sense to me) that it would be much worse than these previous times.
>
> With the high volume sales, gas stations started to raise prices due to demand.  Some even made it as high as the $5 mark.  I suspect some of these were gouging.  However, some were stations low on gas and waiting for shipments, that didn't want to have to pay to reprime their pumps.  Several places were full of cars and starting to line up.  But, it was starting to die down.
>
> Finally, as if this weren't bad enoughthough, a local T.V. station decided to report on the high traffic at the pumps as well as report the rumors.  They didn't substantiate or debunk these rumors they just reported them as rumors.  Unfortunately, it appears as though the people watching focused on the bad parts of the rumors and missed the fact that they were just rumors and so the buying went on.  Once again the cars started to line up around the block at the stations.  Some places were much worse than others.  It seems as though some places kept their wits about them and took a wait and see attitude.
>
> It's my understanding that we now have several local stations that either are out of or low on gas.  So, regardless of wether or not the rumors were true, the panic mass of people have made them true.  I like to call it "self fulfilling prophecy" or "never underestimate the power of idiots in mass amounts".  Either way, if you knew about it yesterday, you were pretty much forced to buy, if you could afford to.  That way you wouldn't get stuck with the higher price that the idiots had scared up.
>
> Depending on who you talk to today, this is either a real thing that and we are going to run low or out of gas within the next week if the storm goes bad, or it's a hoax and this was only occuring here in southern Illinois, Southeast Missouri, and part of northwest Kentucky.  So, I'm asking people here if they have experienced anything similar in the last couple days and trying to make heads or tails of this insanity and idiocy.
>
>
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