I ended up on the wrong end of an email chain yesterday with that idiotic "Let's not buy gas on Thursday next week, then gas prices have to drop!" This time the email was apparently started by "an (unnamed) executive at Dr. Pepper" or some other soda producer, who likely knows everything there is to know about the oil industry. Seriously, it's not even worth my bandwidth or time anymore to send back the Snopes.com article on that email.
USA Today has a story about oil prices dropping to $123 a barrel, although our local price at the pump is going up above an average of $4 a gallon.
An excerpt from the article:
While the cost of oil accounts for the vast majority of the price of a gallon of gas, other factors — including gasoline supplies and refining margins — can also affect the price. Refining margins are slim because oil prices have nearly doubled over the past year, while gas prices have risen only 27%.
While oil prices have retreated, refiners, gasoline wholesalers and retailers remain under pressure to raise prices to improve their margins, analysts say. That pressure is why gas prices are likely to go higher.
Still, Rozell said, if gas prices get to $4 nationally, they aren't likely to stay there for long: "I think we've pretty much petered out unless there's an event that affects supply."
Even if oil prices remain where they are, gas prices will likely fall 5 cents to 7 cents over the next week, though they may first briefly hit $4, Cordier said.
Even though oil prices are slowly dropping, gas prices won't follow an immediate corresponding drop for various reasons. Even if everybody in the United States didn't buy gas next Thursday, that would not affect anything. If anything, it would throw a statistical glitch into the system and further destabilize everything.
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