Was talking with my elderly aunt and she mentioned gas wars back in the day…I had to laugh, as I immediately though of Iraq, but then remembered what she was talking about.
Back in the late 50’s and early 60’s, gas stations would sometimes have too much gas on stock and start lowering prices to sell it. Suddenly, in a small town, there would be a “gas war”…one station would lower the price, and the others would lower it more until a normal 50 cent per gallon would suddenly be 30 cents or less at several, if not all, of the gas stations…everybody would get in their cars and quickly drive to those stations and fill up their tanks.
It didn’t happen often, and it was usually just a day or two, but enough for the phrase “gas war” to be common and once word got out, every car in town had a full tank. Of course, this was in the days when there was no self-serve. A man would come out, fill your tank and wash your windows while the car was being filled. If you asked, he would also check your oil and tire pressure for no charge. After your tank was filled, you handed him the cash, he went in and then brought you back your change.
Yeah, that really was the way people used to get gas back then.
Ah, those were the days. I could fill up my '57 Chevy for $2.
Seriously, 50-cent gas would have been very expensive. People where I lived would cross the street to get gas at 22 cents instead of 23 cents, and they’d drive to the outskirts of town to get it at 19 cents. The people I knew called these “price wars” and not “gas wars.” But the regular price was not that much more. I don’t think I paid more than 50 cents a gallon until the early '70s (which was also when the 55mph speed limit went into effect where I lived–before that, it was 70).
Those were the days indeed. 19.9 is the cheapest I ever remember it getting as well ( This was East Tennessee - not exactly the oil patch). Was driving a VW at the time - could go forever on less then $2.00
For about a week one summer in the early 60s, Foreacre Shell at the corner of Burlington and Dubuque in Iowa City was selling gas for $0.139–essentially the tax plus two cents. Regular price was, I think, about 32 cents. You actually drove into those places and asked for “A dollar’s worth of regular.”
And with a full take of gas, you could get a glass on the corner gas station. I remember gas in the 32 cents a gallon range, but it was the mid to late 60s before I was old enough to understand the concept. My Mom told us about the gas wars, which were just a few years before.
I recall gas wars, but I don’t recall them being real cut throat. I also remember seeing gas for 34 cents a gallon as a child.
Related topic: the experts now say that the oil companies have no control over their pricing-that it is strictly market forces* (they also say that high gas prices reflect a robust economy), but back in the '70’s, the higher prices were all blamed on OPEC. Those nasty Middle Easterners were showing their dislike of America and exercising their global political clout by upping the price, supposedly. There were runs on gas, lines at the pump, some stations ran out of gas, thereby fueling (sorry, bad pun) the hysteria. That is what I remember as a girl.
So, whatever happened to OPEC and it’s monopoly of the oil market? I thought it was THE arbiter when it came to this market. Or am I hopelessly out of date and should go back to gardening?
sorry for hijack.
*which really doesn’t explain record profits to me, but it’s been a long time since Econ class.
Daddy would take all the coke bottles to the grocery store for the refund and would have enough to fill the tank on our '49 Nash Ambassador.
He would drive 20 miles out of his way to get gas for 1c per gallon cheaper.
He would rock the car to be sure the gas filled the spout all the way to the cap.
I can remember “price wars” (may have been “gas wars” but the “price wars” were more common) where the price went below 20c.
In the early '60’s I had an MGB and I could fill it up for $3.
I could make $5 serve an entire weekend’s fun with a movie and a dinner at Shoney’s.
Daddy considered any brand of gas but Gulf, Pure, Shell, Sinclair, Texaco, and Esso (later Exxon) to be “off brand” and wouldn’t buy things like Tan-Kar, Cities Service (later Citgo), unless he was about to run out, and then just enough to get to a “real gas” station.
Even though gas was cheap in those days, it wasn’t all that much cheaper by comparison to other consumables like milk, bread, coffee, and even cigarettes and beer. I can remember checking out groceries that would fill two carts and being amazed when the total came to over $30. Nowadays you can carry $30 worth of groceries in one hand.
I was born in 1944, so I have great memories of gasoline which was normally 29.9/gal. in the late 40’s and all through the 50’s being cut to 19.9/gal. when individual stations in individual towns had “gas wars.”
Lest we think this is some modern phenomenon, go back and read about the same thing happening first in the mid-1920’s. Gasoline at that time was about .26/gal. Then some of the Western States decided this was highway(sorry) robbery. And South Dakota unilatterally dumped tons of gasoline into the market, forcing the price below .16/gal. Other states followed suit and the price cutting spread to the EAst, with many refineries being forced out of business due to the price cuttting.
The up and down wars continued on a State/regional basis into the 1930’s. By this time the wars were fuled(sorry again) by competition between national refiners. Most of the wars ended in the mid-1930’s when the refiners decided they were better off agreeing to keep prices stable.
The concept of individual stations cutting prices to help their business in a small location really didn’t start until the late 1940’s/early 1950’s.
By 1963, regular prices in the L.A. area were 31.9/gal. They “surged” in the mid-1960’s to 33.9/gal. By 1969 it was 38.9/gal.
When I started working in a Mobil station in 1967 regualar was 29.9/ and premium was 34.9/. My station was in LA, and all the brand name stations around us were also at this price point. When a gas war hit*, we put out a sign that said “GAS WAR” and dropped the price to 24.9/ and 29.9/. **
When I moved to central California to go to college (1970) gas got very expensive, it was 34.9/ for regular, and 39.9/ for premium.
All of these prices were full serve.
When the '73 gas crunch hit, prices went over 0.50/ gallon in LA for the first time. I remember seeing a cartoon with two guys waiting in a gas line. One guy says to the other “If you told me a year ago that I would wait in line to pay 50 cents per gallon for gas I would have told you you were nuts.”
Those were the days.
We would get a phone call from the marketing department saying that they were cutting the price, so we were to cut our prices and try to up our gas sales.
**And yes we gave out glasses or mugs with a fill up sometimes.
The cheapest gas I remember was when I was driving around with my sister. She would buy regular for 29.9¢/gallon. When I got my first motorcycle, which was street legal though I would not be old enough for a license for a few years, gas was 49.9¢/gallon. I carried fifty cents in my tool box in case I needed a gallon of gas. This was after the oil embargo, so I never saw an actual ‘gas war’.
But I do remember a bumper sticker that said GAS WAR PRICES. GAS WON.
I remember being able to fill my van for a five. I still have a bunch of the old glasses, too. Shell, Atlantic Richfield, the works. $29.9 seems to be the price that sticks in my mind. I clearly remember telling myself that I’d stop driving before I’d pay a dollar a gallon for gas! :eek:
I remember gas wars; when I was a kid, prices were in the $0.25-$0.29 range. I remember buying gas at $0.17 in a small town in Oklahoma in the mid 1950s. Like someone said earlier, other things were not all that expensive, compared to gasoline. The cost of living was like a $1.50 per six pack, cigarettes were less than $0.30 a pack, etc., etc.
I remember a driving trip from Amarillo Tx to Kansas City Mo when I was first married. (1965) there was a gas war in a small town in northern TX where gas was 13.9c per gal. We’d filled up when we left town so weren’t in need. On the return trip, it was back up to 26.9c. Of course, you might remember, minimum wage then was less than $1.00.
Probably $50.00-$60.00 per week; somewhere in that range. As it happens, my darling Marcie is watching some sort of documentary re the Cuban missile crisis at the moment. While that was ongoing, I was buying a 3bdrn/2bath house in Plano, Texas for $14.5K. Interest rate was “about” 3% and my payments were $88.88 per month. It was hard to save anything on my salary.
I’m too young to remember much in the way of price wars, but Oh Lord I remember the brand loyalty campaigns. Every other commercial on the radio baseball broadcasts was for one or the other brands of gasoline.
And to keep you coming back, each station had some kind of contest, where if you filled in a complete row you won a prize. It was either International Flags, or coins with presidents on them, or animal stamps or some such. I’d be giddy every time we bought gas, not because I expected (or even cared) that we’d win anything, but because I thought the tokens were cool.
The cheapest gas war I can remember was sometime in 1962 or 1963 when the price got down as low as 16.9 cents. But it only lasted over a weekend.
By the time I got my license in the late 60s, gas prices were between 30 and 36 cents and would stay that way until the 1973 oil embargo.
Point of reference. The house we live in right now was built in 1957 and originally sold for something like $16,000-$19,000. Our last tax assessment had it right at $250,000.
In 1963 my friends and I would get a gallon of gas in Palo Alto, Ca in our English Ford. It only used .25 worth or less to go to Berkeley where the gas wars drove pries from ,15 to $.19. We would fill up and drive for weeks on the cheapest gas I ever bought. Those were the days!
