Quote:Thank you. I signed in just to respond, but you answered more eloquently than I could have.

 

Oh, and for everyone who sees their local gas station with a much higher price than neighboring gas stations?  Yeah, I can pretty much guarantee in every one of those cases they're just franchised gas stations (like well over 75% of them are) who are setting their own prices.  

 

Oil companies don't tend to operate more than a handful of their own branded gas stations since there just isn't enough reason to.  Much more of their capital has better returns developing new fields (well, not these days...) and the downstream (refineries, marketing, service stations) are almost just token ownership to keep market share and brand awareness going.  There's at least one supermajor whose downstream& marketing operations are only 8% of total income--granted, that's not a great position to be in at the current market atmosphere.

 

Don't forget, we're in this situation because foreign interests are deciding to flood the market (as are we, to an extent, as we haven't stopped our shale production since they're all trying to keep market share as well).

 

It's going to be an interesting economy.  There are going to be major layoffs this year.