Just Coincidence You Say? I Wonder...

My wife doesn't drive so, each morning, at about 6:30, I drive her to work and I also pick her up when she gets off at about 3 pm. Since I currently work out of our home and don't have any particular start time myself, I'm sure this makes me a candidate for Husband Of The Year. But I've already talked about all that in an earlier post, so let's not dwell on it now.

What I do want to talk about is something interesting that I'd been noticing all last week. En route to Judy's place of employment, we pass a Pioneer gas station. Every morning last week, the posted price at this gas station was around 94 or 95 cents per litre, and every afternoon by 3 pm it fell to around 87 or 88 cents per litre.

Now, I don't pretend to understand the vagaries of the oil and petroleum market, but I'm pretty sure that the price of a barrel of crude hasn't been bouncing up and down like a ping pong ball, climbing by about 7% each night and gradually settling back down by the same amount during the day.

At first, I thought that maybe this was a quirk of this particular gas station so, one day, I drove to a nearby Sunoco after dropping Judy off, and noted that its price was also posted at about 95 cents per litre. Sure enough, that afternoon, the Sunoco's price per litre had also fallen to about 88 cents. So this wasn't just a peculiarity associated with one solitary gas station or even one particular franchise.

Call me a cynic, but I can't help wondering whether these price fluctuations might not have something to do with gouging the morning commuter crowd. It's probably a safe bet that most people tend to fill up their cars on the way to work in the morning, rather than on the way home in the afternoons. For that matter, most people aren't yet finished their work day by 3 pm. Maybe I should check the prices again between 5 and 6 pm. If they're suddenly back at 95 cents, I'm gonna have some hard questions.

As if it wasn't bad enough that they jack up the prices every long weekend...