Editorial: Price of gas outside our control

Published 12:03 am Thursday, April 14, 2011

Whenever gas prices spike — and they’re almost back up to $4 per gallon as we write this — anyone with e-mail, a Facebook account or any other digital connection to the world will usually get a message from a friend that sounds something like this: “May 12 is national gas-out day! Let’s show Big Oil that we’re not going to take it! Don’t buy gas on May 12!”

It’s natural to feel the need to take some kind of action when we’re powerless, and we are individually powerless when it comes to the price of a gallon of gasoline.

Unfortunately, these “gas out” days — if one is ever successful in recruiting more than a handful of people — will do more harm to local business owners than major oil companies, and will have no effect on gas prices.

First, because any kind of boycott day when it relates to gasoline is mostly just a shift in demand from one day to the next, and because the gas pump is not hooked up directly to an oil well in the Middle East, no matter how many people participate, “Big Oil” won’t feel it.

By the time you pump your gas into your car, it’s been refined, mixed with additives, shipped thousands of miles, stored, shipped thousands of miles more, stored in a terminal and trucked to a local gas station, where it’s stored a little longer.

“Big Oil” has already been paid for it.

However, boycotting refueling for a day will have an effect, one that very few people think about.

Those local gas stations with the names of “Big Oil” companies on them are actually locally owned and employ your friends, neighbors, relatives and customers of your own businesses.

Those local businesses make only pennies per gallon in profit — if at all — and depend on people coming into the store after they’ve pumped their gas to buy food, soda and tobacco products (by the way, when you pay by credit card for your gas in the store or at the pump, the credit card company makes more on that purchase than the owner of the gas station).

So if one of these “Gas Out” days manages to hoodwink enough people, it will harm local businesses.

It’s not like someone will decide to buy two donuts the next day instead of one, and the gas stations still need to pay their employees, even if no one is buying gas that day.

While we may be powerless over the price of a gallon of gas, we’re not powerless over how much fuel we use.

You can cut down on the amount of gas you use by, for example, shopping downtown in your hometown, rather than driving to Mishawaka. You can take a vacation locally instead of driving out of state. There are countless ways to save money when gas prices spike that won’t harm our local economy.