Gas Prices up in Time For Busy Travel Season
November 19th, 2007 | by Brian Carr |Here we are less than two days away from the beginning of the busiest holiday traveling period, and gasoline prices are just shy of the record highs set back in May. Good thing turkey comes with its own natural sedative, because for many of us this is going to be a painfully expensive weekend.
According to GasBuddy.com, the national average gas price is now at $3.09 per gallon. While today’s price is about two cents less than a week ago, it’s up 86 cents from one year ago. There are currently 38 states reporting an average gasoline price above $3 per gallon, with Hawaii reporting the highest average price at $3.45 per gallon. New Jersey is currently reporting the lowest average gas price at $2.90 per gallon.
Unfortunately, gas prices couldn’t be spiking at a worse time, especially since AAA has estimated that nearly 39 million Americans will travel 50 miles or more from home this Thanksgiving weekend. Compounding problems is the fact that gasoline prices have jumped relatively quickly, leaving many families without time to plan or budget for the higher travel costs.
While it would be nice to think that high gasoline prices might be contained to just the Thanksgiving weekend, with the price of oil having found a strong base above $93 per barrel, it looks as if this problem is going to linger well beyond the Christmas and New Year’s holidays.
Moral of the story: start saving your money now because $4 gas is looking more and more likely by the day. Or, just invite everyone over to your place next year and save on the travel expenses.
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One Response to “Gas Prices up in Time For Busy Travel Season”
By Bob on Nov 21, 2007 | Reply
Wouldn’t it be nice to see people band together and boycott one oil company. How effective do you think it would be if over the entire holiday season if we did not buy gasoline from just one company. You see the old gas out strategy just does not work, but if the whole country chose not to buy gasoline from say BP, Exxon-Mobile, Shell, etc… Do you think that the price of oil and gasoline are driven by demand or do you think that the oil companies have filtered some of those excess profits back into the market to bid up the wholesale prices of their products on the stock exchange. How do we as consumers get their attention? Easy, you just stop buying their product. Now if this country had a free economy instead of a state run economy, and if the market was based on capitalism and not statism then the situation would be much different. In order to effect change it requires action or sacrifices on the part of the benefactor, the consumer. If these gasoline prices are market driven as the experts say, then you take away the market share of one company at a time, for a prolonged period, like 6 months. When that one company sees it’s market share drop, then it’s prices will drop once again creating competition in the market place, not this non-competition, everyone is a winner driven market. You need to decide which oil company is the greediest, then starting today you stop buying their product for
say the next 6-14 months. If it does not have a long drawn out protracted effect, then it does not hit them in the pocketbook, and therefore they do not care. It is your choice who you buy your fuel from, at least until the government decides to enact some equality of opportunity law or some other unjust legislation.