Great Gas Panic of 2008 didn’t need to happen

The expert purveyors of doom and gloom (television news) got the ball rolling on what will become known, locally, as the “Great Gas Panic of 2008” last week.
Breathlessly, and with a look of grim, well-practiced concern on their faces, news anchors warned that Hurricane Ike had shut down important refineries in Texas and that gas here at home would go up to as much as $5.00 a gallon, or more, and there would be fuel shortages.
Nevermind that only a relatively small percentage of U.S. fuel comes from those refineries.
Forget the fact that wholesale costs of gasoline and oil have been declining of late, and the OPEC oil lords recently voted to CUT production because demand was down and with it, prices.
No, the folks that have become adept at working the words “SHOCKING” and “GRUESOME” into the most mundane of news stories, and then try to convince us to huddle and cower in our basements every time there is a thundershower … well, they had some fear to peddle and they weren’t about to miss the opportunity.
What I don’t understand is the difference in reactions to this news?
In Corbin, we took the bait hook, line and sinker.
Every soccer mom in town rushed hell-for-leather to the nearest gas station to fill up both 1,000-gallon tanks in their 37-passenger SUVs.
People were topping off boats, generators, $8,000 zero-turn radius 52-inch cut riding lawn mowers, weed-eaters, motorcycles, go karts … you name it! It was kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy, really. Someone predicts gas prices will rise and there will be shortages, everyone goes to the pumps at once in a mad dash, therefore causing gas prices to rise and some stations to run out of fuel. It’s genius marketing, really.
I left irrational insanity behind Friday for a trip to Lexington. I expected a similar scene – long lines and many stations with little baggies over the pumps to indicate they had no more gas. I figured those selling gas would be doing so at $5.00 a gallon.
Instead, it was business as usual. Gas, almost uniformly, was $3.85 a gallon. Some places were less, a few more. No lines. No shortages.
In fact, just about all the way up I-75 it was the same scene. Prices unchanged and plenty of gas.
I could mull forever why people reacted so differently in different communities, but I’ll probably never come up with a meaningful answer.
One thing we did learn in the midst of the “Gas Panic” was the collusion and price jacking between local stations is real.
We talked to managers at several gas stations. One told us he didn’t intend to raise prices on gas last Friday, but then did so less than an hour later. The reason: everyone else was doing it too.
Huh?
This works precisely the opposite of just about every other commodity.
One grocery store would not raise the price of, say, breakfast cereal or bananas simply because a competitor was more expensive. Matter of fact, its precisely the opposite. Competition demands stores try to keep prices AS LOW AS POSSIBLE to entice customers to buy from them. Wouldn’t gas stations operate under the same principals?
They sure didn’t Friday. I think a rigorous investigation by our state Attorney General is warranted.
I hear a lot of people complain about the price of gas, but it doesn’t seem to me like anyone really is slowed down by it. I see just as many cars on the road as I did when it was $2.50 a gallon – and I hear just as much griping. No one is parking the Expedition or Land Rover in favor of a Schwinn. How about a weekend at home with family playing board games or cooking out with the neighbors?
I’m not saying we should totally abandon our current lifestyles for bohemian simplicity. Perhaps if we scaled back just a bit, made some minor modifications to how we live and started thinking about conservation of our natural resources (oil) instead of trying to use them up as fast as possible, there’ll be a bit less panic next time the TV talking heads try to whip us into a frenzy.