As seen here in Phoenix a couple years back [https://www.fox10phoenix.com/news/seeing-things-4-44-prices-pop-up-at-circle-k-locations-across-the-valley](https://www.fox10phoenix.com/news/seeing-things-4-44-prices-pop-up-at-circle-k-locations-across-the-valley)
In: Technology
Giving an accurate answer of that would require finding somebody familiar with the inner workings of that business.
But a possible reason is that some central location is involved in the calculation — for instance the price is based on some base price obtained from a refinery or whoever provides the gas stations, and then has additional factors applied on top, such as tax, a profit margin, etc.
Since the price is exactly the same in multiple places it seems likely something went wrong in the calculation process. Perhaps some system provided invalid data, and the calculation broke in some strange way due to that. It could be that $4.44 is some sort of maximum limit — for instance determined by calculating the global average gas price, and then deciding that a station may not show more than twice that. In which case all calculations maxing out would be capped at the same amount.
But that’s just guessing, and I think you’re unlikely to get an exact answer unless somebody actually explained the technical details somewhere. How a business makes pricing decisions and the inner workings of their system is often proprietary information.
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