Gas pump in Jacksonville, Florida. Wikipedia Commons.
Can you even remember when you last paid less than $3.00 a gallon for gasoline?
Lordie! This noon I swung by the Costco that regularly has the chain’s cheapest prices in town, to refill half a tank: two dollah and ninety-nine cents a gallon!
Okay, one cent does not a lot less than $3.00/gallon make. However, the Circle K around the corner was posting $3.09 for regular unleaded. The Exxon across the street: don’t even ask.
USA Today says prices are down around $2.75 in some parts of the country. Doesn’t seem to be happening in our parts: cheapest price registering at one of those price round-up sites is $2.95, in neighborhoods where you’d just as soon not unlock your car doors, to say nothing of get out and pump gas. I’m happy to pay four cents a gallon to fill up at a site that’s on my beaten path at an outlet that’s at least reasonably safe.
How much are you paying in your part of the country? And do you still remember hypermiling?
At Planting Our Pennies, Mrs. PoP reflects on grocery-store offers of gasoline discounts that grocery stores sometimes offer regular customers. Ultimately she concludes that these programs are hardly worth the effort.
Here in lovely uptown Phoenix, Safeway stores offer a gasoline discount after you’ve racked up some crazy number of dollars on purchased registered with the annoying red card. So every once in a while, they’ll offer my deceased dog (in whose name the card is made out) cents off on gas.
Problem: the nearest Safeway with gas pumps is way to hell and gone up on the north side! Safeway has reserved its shiniest new stores, the ones that sport gas stations, for the White Flight set. So Safeway gas stations exist only in areas close to the upper-middle-class tracts where the white folks have moved. And those areas are way, way off my beaten track. By the time I got all the way up there and back, I would have spent more on wasted gasoline than I would have saved on the gas buy.
And besides…better strategies exist. IMHO the Costco AMEX card is about the best of those. You get 3% back on gasoline (which is usually pretty cheap at Costco to begin with), 2% back at U.S. restaurants, 2% back on travel purchases, and 1% back on everything else. Once a year you get a lump-sum cash back “reward” — a kickback on purchases made during the year.
There’s a Costco on every corner in this city, so it seems. Costco underprices stations in the immediate vicinity of its stores. Gasoline prices vary wildly by the part of town you’re in: in upscale Scottsdale you can pay ten to thirty cents a gallon more than other parts of town. In the westside slums, you’ll pay ten cents a gallon less than you’ll pay in the more or less middle-class tracts in the central areas or the far west.
One Costco, which is on my way to many destinations, straddles an aging middle-class district and a downscale high-density area that feathers into the gang-infested tracts bordering the I-17. That thing ALWAYS has the lowest prices around. I try to time gas purchases to days when I know I have to drive down in that direction. The gas is cheaper in the first place, and then I get a 3% kickback on it.
So ultimately, by purchasing gas at Costco regularly — even if I happen to be at one of the higher-priced outlets — I end up saving a lot more than I would if I traipsed up to North Phoenix for the privilege of collecting “bargain” gas from Safeway.
In the gasoline department, BTW: man, quitting the hateful teaching gig sure is saving on the gas! In the last month I taught, the four-day-a-week commute racked up an astonishing $230 in gasoline bills. In the first full month of freedom: just $80.
Just think of all the things I can diddle away that $150 savings on! 😀
So yesterday afternoon I hear on the radio that gas prices are on the way back up. This noon I’m at Costco and notice on their sign that the price there is $3.09.
Huh. That seems like a pretty fair price, and so even though I’m down only a quarter of a tank, I decide to fill up on the way out.
Right.
The lines at the pumps are almost back to the street! So much gas is flowing out of there that they have not one but two tankers pouring more in. Apparently everybody else has the same idea–grab it while the grabbing’s good–because nobody lingers long at the pump. In a couple of minutes the lady in front of me and I both pull into the shade and jump out of our cars.
The dog chariot only takes $20 worth, but the woman before me is done even quicker than I am. Shortly I’m cruising south on the freeway, headed for the Funny Farm.
Price at the two off-ramp stations: $3.23. Nice: a 14-cent savings!
But I figure gas stations along the freeway are always overpriced.
Approaching my neighborhood through the slum to the north, where prices should be lower, I spot the sign on the corner Circle K: $3.29!!!
Wow!
Though I’ve never bought gas at a Circle K, because at least around here they’re not the safest venues for a lone woman, I’ve noticed that sometimes they’re on the low end. But even at “convenience” prices: twenty cents a gallon more than Costco?
Mwa ha ha! I feel very smug.
Images:
Gasoline pump, Indiana. Derek Jensen. Public Domain.
{sigh} It’s strangely disorienting to walk into the garage to toss the trash in the recycling bin and find the darned place empty. Vacant. Lonely.
The Dog Chariot is down at Chuck’s Auto Service, there to have its oil leak diagnosed.
Weird, isn’t it, how one develops an affection for inanimate objects? (Or does one? Maybe I’m crazy as a loon!)
My favorite car was the beautiful little Camry I gave to my son at the time I bought the Dog Chariot. I loved that car: gave it a name, “Katydid,” because its license plate (the first I’d ever bought on my own, as an independent person!) started with the letters KTD. But in due course I had to have a vehicle that was large enough that Anna the German Shepherd couldn’t stand on back seat, plant her muzzle next to my ear, and bark (nonstop!) in the decibel range of a nuclear blast.
LOL! Buying a minivan so Anna couldn’t deafen me had a lot to do with the 40 grand I spent on that animal during her lifetime. Hence the sobriquet the thousand-dollar-a-day dog.
At the outset, I wasn’t nuts about the Sienna, an ungainly, lumbering, gas-guzzling bison. Looked like and drove like a suburban mom’s car-pooling bus. Oh well.
But over time, it grew on me. It has a lot of room: room to haul junk around, room to haul not one but two ninety-pound dogs, room to sleep in when you’re car-camping and a scary lightning storm blows up. With its Camry chassis, it’s one helluva lot more comfortable to ride in than a Suburban or a Land Cruiser or a Chevy van (all of which I’ve driven endlessly). And it puts plenty of steel between me and my fellow homicidal drivers.
It is, in short, like a good man: maybe not so rakishly handsome, but kindly, capacious of heart, and reliable.
Last time the cost of gas went through the stratosphere, I took out three of the four back bucket seats, by way of relieving the vehicle of some weight. The effect was to create a cargo bay the size of a limestone cave. Never put them back. It seems to have worked. Despite the car’s decrepitude, this morning I calculated that it made almost 21 mpg over the past two weeks’ worth of exclusively in-town driving. Not bad, for a tank with an EPA rating of 18 mpg.
So, it makes me feel sad not to have the Dog Chariot sitting in its familiar place, right next to the water heater in the garage. (Yeah. I know.) (There’s a fire door between the garage and the house. Yes.) And I guess that’s why I don’t feel in any great hurry to run out and buy a new car, even though it’s past time to get one and even though my financial dude says I can afford it.
Nothing lasts forever, of course. Not even you and me. But I’m going to miss that car when it’s gone.
Like everyone else in town, I’ve been putting off buying gas until the last possible minute. Wednesday evening, the Dog Chariot had what looked like a quarter of a tank left. Figured I could get to my Scottsdale breakfast meeting and back to the in-town Costco (cheapest known source of fuel in the city), and so at 6:30 headed east. Interminably east.
By the time I got to lovely mid-town Scottsdale, the gas gauge registered 1/8 of a tank. But the road was slightly inclined, and sometimes (I hoped) the unlevel miniscus in the tank would warp the reading. As I turned onto Scottsdale Road, I noticed a Sinclair station in the AJ’s shopping center at Lincoln and Scottsdale.
Once sprung from the breakfast meeting, I stopped in to pick up a gallon (worth 18 miles), which I knew would carry me into town, where I could fill up at the ghetto Costco.
Pulled up to the pump behind some rich guy who wasn’t even paying attention to how much gas was blasting into his tank, viewed the amazing prices (in Scottsdale gas station owners are not allowed to flaunt their prices with gigantamous roadside signs), backed out, and drove away.
I should’ve known. Sinclair????? There are no Sinclair stations in Arizona. This is some sort of artifact. And what do artifacts cost?
$4.50 a gallon, that’s what artifacts cost.
{gulp!} Could I be reading that right? Surely not. But I wasn’t sticking around to find out.
Drove west, drove west, drove west, drove…until the red idiot light came on, along about 36th street. Spotted a Chevron station at 16th street. Darted in and pumped 1.5 gallons of $3.79 gas. This would suffice to reach the pore folks’ neighborhood.
Drove south drove south drove south drove west some more.
At last I reach familiar territory and whip into the Costco gas station off 19th Avenue and Bethany Home, the lot nearly empty because the store isn’t open at this hour. Usually the line is halfway out to the road.
Hot dang: $3.67!
So it was that, compared to what I would’ve paid if I’d lived in lovely uptown Scottsdale, I saved $12.03 on 14.5 gallons of red-blooded Arabian gasoline.
I reflect: If I had a car that made 35 mpg, such as the Hyundai Sonata, I’d only have to fill up once a month. That would save me $58.72 a month.
Maybe it’s time to trade in the Dog Chariot. Whiz-Bang Financial Manager, having calculated my Vanguard Funds’ cost basis according to my father’s date of death, says I should have to pay zero taxes on the short-term corporate bond fund that was my car-purchase savings while I had a job. He thinks it’s stupid to pay $350 for a new timing belt on an 11-year-old junker (he predicts + + + operating costs). Accountant thinks it’s a toss-up: buy, don’t buy, do what you want…probably doesn’t make much long-term difference.
Hmmm… $58.72 a month = $704.64 a year saved on gasoline.
Cost of new Sonata less trade-in on the junk = around $20,000; 4% of twenty grand (allowable drawdown from invested retirement savings) = $800. Not exactly a toss-up, unless you factor in the $350 for the timing belt plus God only knows how much for other repairs.
Cost of 2011 second-hand Sonata through the credit union’s car-buying service, 22,000 miles: $19,900 – $3,000 = $16,990; 4% of $16,990 = $680. Very probably a positive. It’s not the color I want. It doesn’t have the interior trim I covet. But…there it is.
Hyundai Sonata. Shamelessly ripped off the Arizona State Credit Union‘s car-buying site. Click on this and a whole bouquet of pop-unders will populate your computer monitor.
Crude oil is selling at over $106 a barrel this morning. Yesterday one of my students reported that gasoline has reached $4.50 a gallon in L.A.; at least one station was charging $4.75.
Paradoxically, the Times observes that people don’t seem to be cutting back on driving this time around. That writer speculates it’s because the nation is better prepared for surging gas prices, thanks to more fuel-efficient vehicles.
Right. We all ran out and bought Priuses the minute the stock market crashed and we lost our jobs.
Au contraire, O Respected Journalistic Establishment… I suggest something quite different is at work: most people have already cut back driving and gasoline use as much as they can, and so there’s not much room for more savings. Most of us haven’t done it by buying new vehicles, because it’s not cost-effective to do so: add the increase in insurance premiums and registration taxes to the breathtaking cost of a car or truck, and it would take years for the junk to pay for itself in gas savings—even at five bucks a gallon.
Americans don’t change their driving habits much in response to fluctuations in gas prices—and IMHO, we don’t because we can’t. We have to get from point A to point B, and because most cities in this country have no useful public transportation, we’re forced to drive. Few of us are fond of driving, and we grow less fond as gas prices bite deeper into our wallets. The truth is, we’re already not driving any more than absolutely necessary.
Don’t know about you, but that’s certainly true in my precincts. When the economy crashed and I lost my job, one of the first things I did was to limit the number of days a week I’ll drive. And on those days, I carefully plan my route to hit the few stores I have to shop in: Costco, a grocery store, and Home Depot are on my way home from the campus, so I do all my shopping on the days when I have to teach.
In a normal semester, I teach two days a week: Monday-Wednesday or Tuesday-Thursday. So the bulk of my driving is done on those two days.
I have to attend choir rehearsal Wednesday nights, but the drive to the church is short and doesn’t consume much gas. Same drive has to be made Sunday morning; my son lives just a few blocks south of the church, so I often visit him after the Sunday songfest.
In fact, I’m now beginning to think I can bicycle down to the church on Sunday mornings, if I can find a place to lock up the bike. Won’t do it at night…but there is a bike path of sorts that would make it pretty easy to get down there in the daylight. That would limit routine driving to two days a week.
And I’ve reverted to the hypermiling techniques we learned way back in 2008, which can squeeze more than 25 mpg out of my 18-mpg clunker. Today is the 13th: only seven more days until the new budget cycle starts. On its second fill-up of the month, my car still has more than half a tank of gas left. That means I’ve got a fair shot at making it all the way through to the 20th without having to refill.
It’s now costing me $100 a month to run my car. That’s as much as I can afford to budget and still have enough to eat. With twice-monthly visits to the filling station, I have to cut off the pump at $50, whether it fills the tank or not. Lately, this has meant that in fact, I’m not buying enough to fill the tank. But that was sometimes true before the current run-up in oil prices.
Driving less? No, I’m not driving less…because I’ve already cut my driving back as far as possible!
What about you? Are you driving less? If not, why not?
