Ohio is as I’ve noted in the gas price thread is one of those states which undergoes extreme price cycling, with swings of 20+ cents every week or two.
[Gasbuddy state/national charts]
[Link to my post on which states tend to cycle like this, and which ones don’t]
If you come to rely on a particularly bargain basement station or chain, the upswing for you can be MUCH greater than the average swing, because pretty much every station follows the puppeteer chain which initiated said upswing, which in Ohio is Speedway, meaning the local or state average can minimize the actual swing for the first few days as pretty much everyone follows the leader there, but the reports lag the actual increases. After a few days tho many stations will have initiated drops, so the reported average will typically fall far short of the original target value. For you this means if you didn’t follow the trendlines that you may be filling up at the actual peak, and not at the reported average much less the valley. Over the course of a year this can massively add up.
Even today a zoom into the map of the Cleveland area will show many stations as still being below $3.00, when if I actually drive past and check the marquees they’ll almost assuredly show a price much closer to the current average if not the peak (see below).
In my case I have a membership with the regional Meijer grocery chain, whose stores often have a gas station out front. I’ve learned to game their points system along with the cycling dips, in the form of gift card bonuses, and use them for every fillup to the tune of a dollar off per gallon. Because of how their points redemption works, however, this tends to discriminate against vehicles with low tank capacities, as they will redeem a flat points amount (for $1.00 off that is 10,000 points), and not a set amount of points per gallon. My little Civic SI only holds 12.5 gallons, making my break-even point 10 gallons, a mere 2.5 gallon buffer (I could instead go inside and use the 10K for $10 off my grocery bill). This of course would make for an even better deal for large vehicles like SUVs or pickups which might have 20+ gallon tanks.
I am leaving for NJ on Monday to visit family for the holidays. Turns out there is a Meijer in Youngstown, 5 miles from the Penn. border, so I was planning to fill up both going and coming back (I can get across the entire state on about 80% of a tank), which also gives me an extra points bonus if I get 3 fillups in a month. For Thanksgiving this is exactly what I did.
Ohio had cycled back up early last week, to a 3.19 max/3.05 actual average (Tue 10th); I had anticipated such and had filled up several days before. Since Ohio usually cycles on a biweekly basis, and often on those Tuesdays, I figured I could make Youngstown before noon (which is when the Speedways usually send out their siren call to everyone else to mindlessly follow their pied piper tune), fill up, and either fill up again coming back (if there was no upcycle next week), or wait several days and fill up at one of the usual local franchisees that I visit.
[Alas Speedway had cycled on the 26th of November, meaning by the time I got to Youngstown on the 27th, the day before Thanksgiving, I was forced to fill up at the peak…]
Imagine my shock on Wednesday around noon to see a Speedway, and one of their Shell marionettes across the street, with 3.29’s on their marquee. I quickly checked Gasbuddy, and yep all of the local Speedways were now @ 3.29. The nearest Meijer was 7 miles away, opposite direction from my home, but I decided to burn half a gallon and see if they were still at their old ($2.99 price). They were, but I use premium ($3.99 for this location), but the Youngstown one has just a 90 cent spread, so I quickly figured I was still better off waiting, and counting on a downturn for the return leg on the 26th/27th of December.
Checks of other states and the national average showed a large majority were having their prices go up, but national wholesale gas has been flat with moderate +/- 10 cent swings over the past month, and in fact had gone down 8 cents this week before Wednesday had even rolled around. I checked both inventories as well as refinery usage, and could spy no significant trends or cold-induced outages indicating such an increase; check out neighboring Penn.'s average (a state which does NOT cycle at all), and they are DOWN 2 cents this week.
Which means, tl;dr, that most of us are enduring a fairly significant amount of price gouging by these greedy bastards as we may be planning our holiday trips to visit our loved ones. Fuckers. When I noticed their malfeasance last year, I had already resolved to never spend a single cent in any Speedway forevermore; in Florida my previous residence it was Gate Petroleum, but I had noticed during my trips there this past year and half after my move that the other chains had finally learned to ignore them, to my grim amusement. I’ll probably come out even from where the prices would have been if they hadn’t cycled this week, but it’s the principle of the thing. For those who don’t pay attention to this stuff however they are liable to pay through the nose.
) This year it’s a total shitshow.