There are two stations about three blocks from my house, in suburban Cook County (outside of Chicago): one is currently at $4.69, the other at $4.71. When I was out in DuPage County (which has lower taxes) on Friday, it was just under $4.00 in several places.
In San Jose I’ve seen $4.99/gal in a couple of places. The Chevron right around the corner from me is still over $5.50. So yeah, prices are down, but still more than $1 more than a year ago.
Seattle shows being up 3 cents this week (why aren’t you now called Johnny_Seattle I wonder). What you are seeing is price cycling by certain chains, whose retail prices got too far below their wholesale costs, tho 31 cents seems a bit excessive.
Here (NE Florida) the cheapest premium prices can be found at half a dozen Murphy USA stations, but they all cycled up 10 cents or so this week.
What I hate is countywide cycling, where all the Gate stations all go up at once to the same level, and every competitor feels compelled to follow suit. But they’re insanely predictable, doing it at 1 pm on a Tue afternoon 75% of the time. They haven’t tho since the start of the crash. They couldn’t get away with that shite if most everyone just paid attention, but they don’t.
Had to LOL on my recent trip to the Carolinas this past weekend. As detailed in this post, Gasbuddy has a veritable army of stay-at-home price reporters who hardly ever document an actual station in person. But given the declines I assumed any reports would be too high, being out of date by several days as prices continued to fall. [Irrespective of cycling, and since the regular prices are what I first key in on, a nonconsideration here]
How wrong I was.
I drove up to a Shell which Gb insisted was 3.89. Imagine my shock to see it saying 4.19. Was pretty confident because the spreads were 30 & 30, indicative that all 3 had been reported recently (vs. reg. being current, plus 5 days out of date, and premium 9 days, say). So any surprises would thus have to be pleasant ones, I fallaciously concluded…
What actually happened of course is that one of our Fearless and Peerless Homebodies had dragged the plus and prem. prices out of their festering ass when they saw that they were blank on Gb, assuming 30 cents were “reasonable” spreads. Recall it would now take at least a dozen correct reports to override the bullshit ones. Earlier I did find a Shell which was accurately reported with 35 cent spreads…
As of this afternoon, it’s still around $4.70 in suburban Cook County (outside of Chicago). Out in DuPage County, where the county gas tax is lower, some stations are under $4.00 now.