I have never, ever understood this. Gas is for the most part is a simple commodity. Sure, some prefer a premium brand (like Shell) to a cheaper one (like ARCO), but I can’t for the life of me figure out why there is such a wide variance even within a single mile or two of a city (and amongst the same brand!) I would think that supply and demand would reign supreme here. It’s the same stuff.
You get that one gas station that charges $0.10 less than all the others in the area and the lines are out to the street.
So where are supply and demand?
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Something else to think about: I’ve seen operators (especially dealers* who are typically not very sophisticated) that literally don’t know what margin they’re making on a gallon of fuel, or don’t care.
They might not know due to poor reporting systems, and they might not care because they’re pricing for volume or trying to juice their inside sales (as others have mentioned).
*Dealer is a site that doesn’t supply itself; think the Sunoco down the street from you owned by a new American. They have to buy from a wholesaler (or “jobber”) at a markup to cost because they dont have enough volume to run their own loads from a terminal. Often single-site operators. They aren’t gonna have great data compared to your big chains that spend a lot of money on back office / accounting systems.
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