Our Life

i dont think they are all on facebook. nice try though.

olé.

This doesn't just have to be on facebook. Most people have email, and you could just tell them to do it in person. nice try though.

the problem with this is that it actually costs them $2.50 to $3.50 to produce and ship the gas we use. "big oil" only makes a few pennies if not fractions of pennies on each gallon. some gas stations actually sell gas at a loss in order to attract more sales of chips soda and ciggarettes.

its a good theory tho. if the oil companies were truly making a $2 profit off each gallon it would work.

in theory.

Hey, genius, oil companies make billion of dollars a MONTH! They sell by the barrel, and the cost to produce a barrel is equivalent to like 50 cents to a dollar per gallon. And they sell it to the gas stations at probably the equivalent of $2.25-$2.50 per gallon, judging by current end-user prices. Sometimes, they probably charge enough that gas stations have to sell at a near-loss, or a loss.

Point is, it costs the oil companies far less than a dollar to mine and refine a gallon of oil. My father had once told me it was less than 50 cents, but I am gonna say less than a dollar in case he was exaggerating.

i thought that most of the price was taxes. that's what i read in the newspaper anyway. the oil is cheap, the gas stations do only get a few cents a gallon profit, but the government gets a good chunk.

1. i am quite intellegent, and do not appreciate your sarcasm

2. they do make billions of dollars. because a few cents a few trillion times adds up to a few billion dollars. and yes they do sell trillions of gallons. if the statement that there are 300 million people in the US is true, then the average person would only have to buy 3.334 gallons a month to reach 1 trillion gallons sold. i have not checked but im sure the average consumption is much higher, since the most common units used for petroleum is billions or trillions of barrels. and this of course is only dealing with the US. i havent even included the rest of the world.

3. if the oil companies were making more than pennies on the gallon, they would not be making billions of dollars a month. they would be making quadrillions, quintillions, or sextillions. example: suppose in one month 300 milllion people each bought 3.334 gallons at a $1.00 profit. thats 1 trillion profit. i buy approximately 10 times 3.334 gallons a month and i dont consiter myself to be that far out of the ordinary. if i were the average, they would make 10 trillion a month, just from the US, given the same profit per dollar. This is 1000 times more than your billion dollar a month estemate.

4. i get my information to relatively credible sources, such as MSNBC.com. You only cite your father. Granted, your father may well be an economist and expert in the field, but judging by your own skepticism of his credibily, i would say the possiblitly of that is slim.

pps

momma says alligators are so angry because they got all those teeth, and no toothbrush.

Thank you to all who have contributed to this topic so far or will contribute in the future. While i can't decide exactly what to believe so far (as everyone has good points), ya'll certainly are fun to watch. Keep up the good work! : )

There are places like quiktrip that sell at no profit or a loss just to attract people to buy other stuff, but companies like exxon and mobile don't have to buy the gas from other companies because they already have it. they could lower their prices at stations, but that might cause other stations to go out of business and then they could raise again.