Perhaps the BEST B1G Forum anywhere, here at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

Time to start shooting Oil Execs,freeking a fire in Indianapolis what 2 months back now one in Toledo? Sure prolly a garbage can at a McDonalds next to the refinery

From my observations in recent years, prices go up almost immediately upon the mere whispers of any bad news, and don't drop until well after that "high-priced oil" is flushed through the system.

that's my observation as well

Cincy seems to think it's mostly supply and demand

I want to try to explain a little bit about fuel prices here.

First, one of my roles is to do Financials for what is basically a glorified gas station (we sell avgas and Jet-A not 87 Octane for your car but the principles are the same.

We buy fuel in huge quantities (5-10k gallons per delivery) and obviously sell in much smaller quantities.We'd LOVE to do this but, as a practical matter, we can't.

We set our price to be about $1/gallon over our cost. That is roughly what we need to cover our expenses. However, our price is always $1/gal over the CURRENT cost, not $1/gal over what we actually paid for the fuel in our tank. Thus, when the price of fuel rises we show huge profits and when the price of fuel drops we show big losses. We have to do it this way because we can't overcharge for old (expensive) fuel when prices are dropping because our customers would go somewhere else. On the flip side, when prices rise we raise ours immediately even though the inventory was purchased at old prices for two reasons:

• The extra profits make up for our inevitable losses when prices drop, and
• Although the inventory was purchased at lower prices it will be replaced at higher prices so we have to keep up.