Quote:
Originally Posted by ABN_FO
TR
No, but price declines "take a while to work their way through the system". 
My wife and I were talking about that last night. How the price at the pump can skyrocket over night, but will probably take 1-3 weeks to decrease. |
Yes and no. In a past life I work for a wholesale distributor that bought and sold commodities like copper and stainless. If the manufacturer raised the price our price went up immediately, if it went down our pricing followed suite within days if not immediately. And it didn't matter what our actual cost was we followed the market good or bad.
And the reason being was that we had competitors that lowered their prices and if we didn't lower our prices we would lose business.
In my area there used to be Phillips 66, Standard/AMOCO, Sinclair, FISCA, Hudson, Workingmans Friend, Clark, Chevron, Texaco too name a few. We even had a refinery here.
Now we have BP, Shell, QuickTrip, Phillips 66 and no refinery.
Point being there is little to no competition these days and thus little to no competition/motivation to lower the price.If it was truely a competitive market my local BP, Shell, Quicktrip and Star 66 would not be laying dormant with the same stagnant price as their competitior across the street. IMO.