Fuel Availability
We're leaving Sunday from south Louisiana heading to Maine and parts in between. Was wonder if anyone is having problems finding diesel while on the road. Not worried about prices, it is what it is. T...
Forum Discussion
Microlite Mike wrote:
Stations like that are usually "un-branded" and are both in remote areas as well as slowly vanishing. They're usually served by the larger "Jobbers" that service fleets and other accounts that are too small for the large distributors to bother with.
Yep. The indies are definitely the edge cases though.
I used to install back-office software in c-stores and spent a lot of time in gas stations all over the U.S. One of the most interesting installs was for a major jobber in Long Beach, CA. They had about a hundred c-stores and our system consolidated all of their store reports into something they could view daily at their headquarters. Our software product was still in beta, so I spent a couple months down at their HQ tweaking and troubleshooting.
The most interesting thing about spending so much time in their offices was watching all the traders. Those guys were on the phone all day long making buys and sells and it was crazy to watch. They'd buy Chevron's oversupply and sell it to Unocal, etc. I never realized that all those refined products were identical until they were loaded onto the company trucks and the branded chemicals were added. I'd heard before that "It's all the same {stuff} until the chemists whizz in it to make it Shell gas." That never made sense to me until I actually saw the product move around like that.
The other thing I saw was that everyone was making a buck no matter what the price was. The demand is so inelastic that customers like us will keep buying no matter what. But the majors and their whole distribution network all made their buck. The only times I ever saw anybody losing out was when the parent companies would squeeze their dealers with an uncompetitive cost, and then the dealers would lose out to the guy down the street. Doing their price surveys and arguing their case to the majors looked pretty frustrating to those guys. I never did hear the other side of the story though. The only dealers who really seemed pinched were the ones who weren't very good businessmen to start with. Either the majors smelled blood in the water or they were doing something else dumb that hurt their prospects.
