The burbs
Kroger in Jacksonville AR is $2.81 before I apply my kroger card.
I can drive a few miles to a Shell in Gravel Ridge and pay $2.61. It questionable whether the savings is worth the extra drive.
Big City Little Rock averages $2.65 thats in Western LR and the nicer neighborhoods.
Rough part of town where my old house is located gas is $2.53. I’d feel safe filling up there around noon. I’ve used that gas station for years. Definitely not at night.
That’s the rub. I know there was a XKCD strip a few year’s back about time being money, which if you are retired or in no hurry and have no issues relaxing for a few minutes to your car’s tunes and the scenery on the way and back, then that’s cool. But if you are insistent on doing the math to the bitter end, not only does your basic mileage figure in, so does maintenance and depreciation and the risk of an accident.
Quick and dirty number I just got off of Google says the actual cost is $0.58 per mile, which is much higher than the mileage cost alone (which for my 30 MPG ride would be about 10-12 cents/mile). Age of the car and where it is on both the depreciation and maintenance curves figures in as well (esp. since both are inversely proportional to each other, depending on how reliable your ride is and the deal you got on the finance side of thangs).
On the weekend, I needed a block of feta. I almost always buy it at Trader Joe’s. But I figured it was cheaper to pay twice as much at the supermarket that is four miles away, than to make a 50-mile round trip to TJ’s.
If you live in Ohio, Indiana, or Michigan, TOP OFF today, else you may wake up to prices 30+ cents higher than today’s. Price hikes already happening today, but some stations may lag until tomorrow morning (some may not at all, but usually when one begins-here in OH that would be Speedway-they all quickly follow suit). Even though wholesale just went down 7 cents today after oil also dropped thanks to the Saudis announcing a price drop.
Why would prices spike in just those states?
Because they are wayyy overdue for some Price Cycling, by at least a week maybe two (the article applies more to the Corn Belt and not the Great Lakes, where it often occurs on a Mon or Tue). Some states do this crap, others don’t-the latter will see their prices slowly fall until they reach an equilibrium point, where the average will bounce around that point a little bit day by day. The former will more or less keep on dropping until one chain (usually the same one each time) decides enough is enough and they’re losing too much money (their prices are below wholesale) and unilaterally raises them, at which point their competitors typically will follow suit (turns out most do but some don’t).
[It was a Dope thread which clued me into this strange tho understandable set of patterns]
In Florida Gate Petroleum used to set the trend, but now it seems all other chains are now completely ignoring them and setting their prices significantly higher for some weird reason.
$3.459 at my usual place this morning. As I drove by the station at Angel of the Winds Casino, they were advertising $3.299 – but I think they charge extra for credit cards (which the Lummi-owned station doesn’t).
Stalled at $3.199 in these parts here. Usually higher across the border in MA.
NE Minnesota: $2.59 - $2.64
Do you live next door to a refinery or something? I can see the low prices in some regions have to do with the regressive cost of transporting gasoline but I wasn’t expecting prices so low just a little south of the Arctic Circle.
We live near the Cherry Point Refinery. Our fuel isn’t that cheap.
All you need is a hose 
That’s about the range down here in SE Louisiana, which has close to the cheapest gasoline in the US. There are a handful of $2.49 places in the New Orleans suburbs.
EDIT: Check that — a few local stations have dropped below $2.40 per Gas Buddy. A smattering on $2.35s and $2.37s.
Here’s an image of the monthly prices for a state which cycles (Ohio, red), and one which doesn’t (Minnesota, blue):
Once again Discourse ruins my fun, so direct link:
If you are aware of the cycling and are able to fill up only in or near the valleys, it can represent a substantial savings. Of course if every motorist did that these states would soon knock it off.
Not seeing any swings in pricing at my SE Michigan Costco, it’s $3.59 today, which is about the same it has been for the past two weeks.
You only went up only 8 cents, not the 23 we did, plus the wholesale clubs generally don’t follow the cycling trends all that much.
$3.59 at the gas stations a quarter mile from my house. $2.79 at the gas station I usually go to about two miles west. For eighty cents a gallon, the two miles drive in either my 33mpg vehicle or my wife’s 50+ mpg vehicle makes sense. Plus it’s got a much better convenience store inside. And slots! (Were I of that bent.) Plus I head in that direction anyway at least three times a week.
Before Christmas prices in Cincinnati ranged from $2.59 to $3.19 with no real pattern that I could see. There were $0.40 fluctuations within just a mile, and I even saw $0.10-20 variations between gas stations across the street from one another. A particular small Shell station near me, which I had never been to in the 20+ years I’ve lived here because it was always $0.10-20 higher than everywhere else, became one of the cheapest in town for a period of about two months in November and December. They were selling regular for $2.79 while the Kroger barely a mile away was at $3.19.
Now in January they’re all at $2.85 or $2.89. I saw some $2.75 waaaay out on the west side, like 30 miles away, but otherwise nearly all the stations are in sync with one another. Why was it so fragmented back in December? Do they have annual sales targets they were trying to reach? I’d never seen it so variable before, and now it almost seems too coordinated.
Read upthread about cycling; during the drops they all get out of whack, as some try to maintain their profit margin vs. their wholesale cost, while others try to undercut the competition to get people to go inside and buy overpriced junk food and such.
But all it takes is one major chain to yank their prices all up to the same level at once, and most every other chain soon follows suit (I am sure there are people whose jobs are to monitor competitors’ prices and note when they start to jump up all in unison like that). Wait a week or three and they’ll all diverge again on the down side.
What you need to do is (a) keep tabs on which stations typically have the best deals, tho as you said that can change each time (for someone like me who uses premium I have to spend more time hunting those stations down than someone who fills it with regular), and (b) bookmark Gasbuddy’s graph there, note when the prices seem about to hit the valley, and top off before they yank them again. oilprice.com lists wholesale gas under the various kinds of crude (tho they don’t label it “wholesale”)-I’ve generally found that the national average tends to be about a buck more, which was the case yesterday.
I saw a 30 cent jump this week, from $2.80 to $3.09.