Geek On The Mountain

I’ve noticed that there are quite a few websites now that allow you to search for the best gas prices in your area. This sounds like a good idea and all, but really, what’s the point?

Say you look at the site and find a gas station selling for 10 cents less than everyone else, and it’s just 5 miles down the road. 10 cents sounds like a big savings until you realize that a round trip will be 10 miles, and, depending on what you’re driving and what kind of traffic and such you have to deal with to get there of course, it might be reasonable to conjecture that those 10 miles will run you around half a gallon of gas. That half gallon is worth $1.50, so you need to get at least 15 gallons just to break even on the whole thing.

Or, if you’re like my relatively small town, there’s pretty much never a difference of more than 2 cents between all the gas stations, making it pointless to even think about driving just a mile down the road. Your gas usage will almost always offset any savings you might find.

Now, it does stand to reason that if you’re already going to a certain area for some other reason then it might be nice to know if you should just fill up while you’re over there. But unless you’re already going to be quite close-by, or else get really luck and find fairly significant savings very close to where you’re at, there really isn’t any point in looking up gas prices to find the best deal.

It is rather “fun” if you can look at the history of gas prices though and confirm just what you thought: 3 years ago prices were nearly half of what they are now.

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