Fuel price rant: Why is the media so wrong?
If the mods combine or delete this, fine, but the issue isn't price gripes; it's how wrong the media has been for about the last year. Last year, gas was going to average $5.00 if you listened to t...
Forum Discussion
The gas & oil industry was the first to develop and fine tune just-in-time product delivery world-wide in an effort to reduce expenses every place possible. The result is when something happens on the other side of the world it quickly ripples thru the system and impacts prices everywhere. I like to say when some Indonesian farmer fills up his lawn mower on Tuesday instead of Thursday we see the impact on prices here on Wednesday.
Walmart's marketing approach was to copy this just-in-time product delivery in the retail market. The result is lower prices, but the downside is they've driven most of the Mom and Pop stores out of business. The other downside is fewer choices. Remember all the brands of shoes you used to be able to buy? They don't exist anymore. Same thing with lots of different gas brands, although in this case a lot of that was driven by regulation. (It was cheaper to expand a company's reserve holding by buying up other companies than by drilling for new reserves.)
The media is wrong about a lot of things and they don't do a very good job at really reporting the news any longer. In the case of gas prices they're probably trying to guess and things they think will impact prices, only because there are to many variables to actually figure it out - something they probably don't know or realize.
Walmart's marketing approach was to copy this just-in-time product delivery in the retail market. The result is lower prices, but the downside is they've driven most of the Mom and Pop stores out of business. The other downside is fewer choices. Remember all the brands of shoes you used to be able to buy? They don't exist anymore. Same thing with lots of different gas brands, although in this case a lot of that was driven by regulation. (It was cheaper to expand a company's reserve holding by buying up other companies than by drilling for new reserves.)
The media is wrong about a lot of things and they don't do a very good job at really reporting the news any longer. In the case of gas prices they're probably trying to guess and things they think will impact prices, only because there are to many variables to actually figure it out - something they probably don't know or realize.
