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You may not have noticed if you own a Prius and haven’t filled up in awhile, but gas is suddenly a bit cheaper than it was, say, yesterday. Fuel prices are approximately at the point where, in 2001, I started to say “Man, gas is getting expensive.”
There’s a fun little website that has probably gotten more traffic in the last six months than, well, ever. Its called Gasbuddy.com, and the idea is that it helps you find cheap gas. What it also does that is kind of fun is let you generate charts like this one;
Fun stuff. One of my favorite features of this website is that it includes the ability to chart the price of a gallon of gas against the price of crude oil. I would like to suggest, for our friends at Gasbuddy, some additional economic benchmarks you could also track the gallon of gas against.
- One Gallon of Milk
- Nachos BellGrande
- The Ford F-150 Pickup
- Admission to a movie
- Your favorite illicit drug
- Sugar Gliders
You get the idea. What becomes interesting to me is that over the last few months, as we’ve all been paying EuroPrices for our fuel, there seems to be this nagging feeling among us that it isn’t fair. Gas should always stay about the same price, right? We don’t expect the cost of everything else to stay the same, so why gas? What is it about the $20 fillup that haunts us?
I have a friend named Neil, who made a statement in about 1994, or so, when gas “shot” up to about $1.25, that we’d never see gas below a dollar a gallon again. In about 1999, I paid $.73 a gallon for gas on the way home for Christmas. Will gas go up again? Sure. Will gas be below a dollar again? Probably not, but ask Neil just in case.
There’s this thing called inflation. It always happens. for some reason, though, we seem to have it in our heads that our 2008 Accord should cost the same to fill up with gas as our 1983 Accord did (to be fair, I have never owned a 2008 Accord, though I currently have a 1994 coupe, and spent about a year driving a 1983 hatchback, so I’m about 75% able to claim that analogy).
Fill ‘er up. Here’s $20. It should cover it. Right?