Yea, I'm still as pissed about this whole oil & gas price hike as everyone else, and I'm really getting sick and tired of the oil and gas industries' blatant and blasé practices of constantly jacking the prices of gas and oil for absolutely not reason whatsoever.
Take for example the common business principal of "Supply & Demand". When supply goes down, the demand rises, and so does the prices because there are fewer of these items available on the market and are therefore more valuable. On the flip side, when supply increases and there are more of these items on the market than people are wanting at the moment, the demand and prices drop accordingly. Pretty simple stuff, right? WRONG!!
See, this does NOT apply in the oil and gas industry. Another fine example is ANY given holiday weekend when a large amount of road travel is expected, and there will be a huge, but temporary, increase in the demand for gas. What do they do? They raise he price of gasoline in "anticipation" of increased demand....whether it really happens at all!
But here's the kicker...AFTER the big "demand" increase over a given high-travel holiday, the prices don't go back down to where they were BEFORE the big "demand increase". Hmmmm, why is that? If the demand has gone back down, then so should the price....unless the demand never really changed and they just need the holidays as an excuse to continually raise prices.
In actuality, most "high-travel" holidays don't see an increase of actual road traffic than most average work days. There is just a higher volume of cars on roads that don't normally see such traffic, while other roads that are usually jammed on non-holidays are completely dead because of the lack of "normal" traffic on those roads...it's just a traffic trade off, not a traffic increase.
During the week in a typical city, the inner roads are jammed with people coming and going to offices and delivering supplies and all of your typical work day stuff. But during a holiday, almost any given major holiday, most of your non-critical businesses are closed, so there won't be the normal traffic in the areas of those businesses.
Vice versa, most sections of rural freeways and highways are pretty dead during your average work week because most folks are in town or doing their usual work traffic driving. However, on a holiday, most people take the holiday off, and instead of driving their normal patterns, they now leave the cities or their homes and businesses and travel elsewhere. But in the end, it's a pretty nominal exchange of traffic patterns with almost no real increase of traffic at all.
Even if there was a demand spike, then there would also be an associated demand drop after a given event, which should result in a price drop back to where it was before the demand increase. But for the oil companies and gasoline companies, they do things differently...why? BECAUSE THEY CAN, AND YOU CAN'T STOP THEM!
Where's my water-powered car?!?! I can't wait for the day when I can drive by the gas stations just to flip them all off because I won't need their stinking gas any more! Fortunately, LOTS of other folks are finished with the gas & oil companies and have come up with alternative automotive power solutions that you can adapt to almost any car. Take a look at some of these sites:
http://www.waterpoweredcar.com/
http://www.carwaterkit.com/
http://www.waterpoweredcarplans.com/