[Purrybonker]

I agree, it's just plain ridiculous... someone should launch an investigation into this. I'm sick and tired of paying these kinda prices for gas. At this rate it's darn near 1/4 the price of a diet cola or bottled water for gosh sake!! How does that make any sense?

Let's see - those darn oil company rip-off artists. All they do is:

* spend millions of dollars trying to find and then pump crude oil out of the ground.

* simply haul that oil to a refinery that cost them a few hundred million to build (or billion if they built it in the last decade).

* jump in a tanker and deliver the now-refined fuel to a network of service stations all over hell's half acre. And this in a safety/regulatory environment that is the most stringent in any area of retail marketing.

* sell the stuff in tiny quantities (relatively speaking) to john Q. public who hates buying the stuff at any price, yet who somehow invests in a vehicle that consumes that maximum quantity of the stuff (read SUV here), thereby granting him greater "griping rights" about the price of gas.

* collect taxes that amount to about half of the selling price of the fuel and remit those taxes to various levels of government.

Those greedy bustards! Compare their economics to that of those poor bottled water producers, for example. I mean those guys have to actually filter that stuff and everything before they can sell it us! And those poor, poor cola makers, why they have to spend millions upon millions of dollars in advertising to get us to willingly throw our money at them! Otherwise we might buy those no-name brands at 1/4 the price of names like COKE or PEPSI. Good thing they keep us on the straight and narrow with our own money.

It's also a good thing that lots of people buy a coke (particularily a slurpee type) when they fill up. That way the service station operator and/or oil company can actually earn a reasonable profit on the transaction.

Things have got to change!