Please Pay Before Pumping

There’s nothing that business-folk love more than a thoughtless, or half-witted consumer. Now, I will freely admit to be somewhat ignorant when it comes to oil drilling and the process that crude goes through to where it becomes pumpable gasoline for my car. I’m no oil magnate, and any stock that I might own in oil companies is so few that I’m never even regarded when it comes to proxy voting. And though my status in the industry is reduced to being not much more than that of your ordinary guzzler, there’s an element of common sense I seem to own that has seemingly gone by the wayside within the community of average Joes, and that leaves us constantly bent over the barrels and being pumped by the energy giants.

When news first spread of the Transocean oil rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico, the echoes of “There go gas prices”, reverberated throughout the comment sections of nearly every online article about the incident. The question I asked, “Why?” was largely ignored, and those who did respond did so with little enlightenment – “Cause they’ve got us bent over the barrel, that’s why!”

None of these bloggers seemed to ask that very question, “Why will prices throughout the industry increase, when only one company, BP, who was contracting the Deepwater Horizon rig at the time of the explosion, would suffer from production costs?” None of them even questioned why they don’t question.

The oil industry has rules that we consumers drink up like refined Kool-Aid. One of those rules is that which states that prices increase during the driving-season, namely the summer months. We simply graze on whatever excuse they feed us, and bleat and scratch our heads when we hear of their annual “record-breaking profits”.

Since the most recent oil crisis - when most Americans had either cut their driving to an “as-needed” basis, or took up the art of drafting behind 18-Wheelers on an open highway, we have watched the prices at the pump balloon all over again. We saw that an oil company can lower prices to $2.60 per gallon and still reap billions in annual profits. We learned that when the cost of production for one company increases, others in the same industry will hop on their back and ride the wave of profit right up to shore where the sheep are needy, and too tired to question anymore.

The answer to “Why?” is not because they can, but it’s because we let them.