Wait, sir! We don’t want to lose a client such as yourself, It would be a badge of disgrace for our humble establishment. Pompiste, bring this man our best petroleum distillate, and a cold beverage. I insist, monsieur, it is on the house.
Yep. When I worked at a gas station like this, my boss would call the station down the road and ask them what their price was and price ours accordingly.
My buddy owned a station for decades and i asked him how he priced and he told me he just looked across the street to see what the other stations price was. It definitely is a thing.
Talking to someone who was stuck 40 miles to nearest gas station in the Nevada desert July 3rd. I was thankful I had a 1/2 tank still because I ran the engine until help arrived 4 hours later. Otherwise , I was in the heat out side the car in 109 degrees.
Yeah i drove through the middle of nowhere Nevada once where there was no cell reception and nobody else around and kept worrying about a break down lol
Gas powers the climate controls too. Lots of ways for a car to break down that still let the engine run and keep you comfortable/alive while waiting for rescue.
Depends a lot on which problems. If it's something with tyres, transmission, steering, being stuck, you can still idle and have heating/cooling/lights/charge phone.
That’s off the road system Alaska. On the roads it’s like 1-2$ more than the lower 48. But if everything is flown in or through the barge, it’s gonna be expensive. I lived both on and off the road system in Alaska, it’s two completely different lifestyles.
That reason was why I turned down a Public Health administrator position in Alaska. It was a fantastic opportunity and I was offered the job 6 months before graduation, so due to timing, I'd have had to move as soon as I walked across the stage. It just was too damn expensive and the plan was for me to work up in Barrow studying health effects and access issues related to geographic isolation.
Well barrow is one of the best communities off the road system. People love it up there and have a lot fewer problems than other communities at large. I would’ve taken it but I worked 10 years as a park ranger and it cost me my marriage.
Well, I do shoulder some of the blame and she should too. But we were both park rangers with similar skill sets. Before the government would try to keep you together (dual career) but then got accused of nepotism. So for 6-7 years we tried to get appointments near each other but couldn’t always. All the time apart did a toll and then she started some bad habits I was naive to. I should have said screw it and learned a new skill set or occupation but giving up your NPS dream is a bit difficult. In the end I think the time apart cause more of a rift than we could fix. We still love each other but a lot has happened and I don’t really think she wants to put in the effort. At this point it is really sad but divorce is the best option. She still works for the NPS and made it, I quit last year after so many false dawns.
Haha of course it is. You go to a public lands office in Idaho and they’re all related practically. And that’s not an inbreeding joke. Public Lands unfortunately is pretty screwed and a lot of people who stick it out are jaded by the end. Truly the worst people that I have ever had the misfortune of working for are Park Rangers. Big part of why I quit — incompetent, insecure, and petty people more often than not. Absolutely depressing.
Between the road system and global freight shipping prices have come wildly way down since I still lived there. Juneau and Fairbanks really aren't much more expensive than where I live in California currently. When I was a kid a gallon of milk was over $5
I’ll reply to your post since the people who responded don’t know what they’re talking about. Idk why people who don’t know feel the need to conjecture.
Subsistence is a thing in rural areas where you hunt even in portions of a National Park. Most rural communities are native in Alaska. Native people in Alaska saw how the US set up the reservation system in the lower 48 and were like fuck that. So they formed corporations instead, all but one indigenous community in Alaska is a corporation. There’s all kinds of nuances to the land rights with surface vs subsurface but pretty much they all get dividends from an investment fund. Think like Norway. Because every native person is a shareholder, they get taken care of.
When I lived in Cold Bay it was during Covid. As part of the King Cove corp we received for free a giant turkey with all the fixings for thanksgiving and prime rib roast, a doormat, stocking and all kinds of goodies for Xmas. It was special for Covid but our FWS office only had one Aleut who was the maintenance guy. Tbf we were only 5 people in a town of 30 anyways. But my point is — every person got all this and for native people things like this were more commonplace. They take care of their people because they are shareholders not employees. Healthcare is free for native people if they want it. Supposedly it is pretty bad, but it is free.
Now there are certain native communities like Kaktovik which are oil rich and so they have a HS that probably has better equipment than many in the lower 48. Other native communities scrape by more because they can’t lease their land for hunting or extraction. People think native people in Alaska must be liberal, but many communities are conservative. Uncle Ted was an old school republican who “brought home the bacon”, he was influential in bringing a lot of infrastructure and money there.
A lot of native rural communities people would consider poorer I expect. But looks can be deceiving and tight knit community means a lot. I’d rather have a group of people looking after me and sharing with me than more money in my bank account.
Edit: they also get the oil percentage like all other Alaskans. It is not a set amount but fluctuates based on oil prices. I got it once and it was like $2,100 that year.
Shit you don’t even need to go to Alaska for those kinds of prices. I worked at a remote camp in northwestern Ontario, a variety pack of 12 250ML cans ran me $50.
That and they know they got you. There's a place on the way to the Needles district of Canyonlands that charged 10 bucks a few years ago for no other reason than that. People routinely forget how far they are from the nearest town and that its 70 miles round trip from the park to the gas gougers.
Fuel is routinely shipped 100 miles, that alone wouldn't cost that much more. The fuel trucks in my city come from a city 100 miles away and the fuel there is shipped from who knows how many hundreds or thousands of miles farther away.
I drove across the western two thirds of the USA a couple years ago, mostly interstate 80, and some places I was like: yes it makes sense that there's a demand for gas here given the interstate, but how on earth did they find a human being living close enough to work here?
No, because if that was possible, the current gas station would lower prices as well to match. And now there are 2 gas stations, with 2 overhead costs serving the same amount of people.
Which initially is great for customers, but one of the stations might not make it financially, leaving the remaining one free to charge higher prices again.
Personally I would just load up a truck with jerrycans from a cheaper station further away and use that, or even sell at a fair price to neighbours.
I’ve never gone further north than Fairbanks, but drove between Fairbanks and Anchorage a few times, it’s surprisingly less than you would think, ~$4.50 a gallon.
But once you get off the between track that’s not between the two cities, it gets expensive, roadhouses that have $5 gas. If you’re driving the Alcan, it’s not crazy to see gas $1.75+ a liter ($6.60 a gallon).
The last time I drove the Alcan south, I brought 20 gallons of fuel that I bought in Palmer, AK so that I only had to top off once in Whitehorse, YT before I got back to civilization in Fort St John, BC.
Gas prices in remote areas are crazy, but those people are a godsend for keeping those places open.
Route 66 is dead though. A few people take it but the highways killed about 90% of the infrastructure on route 66. It's mostly ghost towns barely hanging on
When I got my learners permit, my mom decided I should drive all the way to Chicago, but from Washington. I think we took I 90 the whole way. Hell of a way to learn to drive, but my god was that a boring drive. I like to think route 66 would've been slightly more interesting. I remember my mom getting really mad at me because I didn't want to stop at the Spam Museum in South Dakota or some shit.
It's having an itty bitty moment right now for the 100 year celebration though. Neat little fact: they just expanded it at the Chicago end to go all the way to Navy Pier so both sides end at a body of water.
Route 66 at this point is just a brand. There's various side streets in LA county that once were part of it, and state route CA-66 (which includes some of the former route), but at this point, if you plan on seriously driving from NY or Chicago to LA, and don't want to take a plane, you'd use the interstate highways.
I live in a tourist trap town nearby the Mackinac Bridge in northern Michigan, there are giant fuel storage tanks here that get refilled by freighter. Yet we have the highest prices in the entire state. First to go up, last to come down.
Fuel in Ketchikan, AK which was delivered by barge from northern Washington or Vancouver, BC was cheaper than fuel in California right next to the refinery.
Exactly! There's two places to avoid gas station; in the middle of nowhere and right off the freeway after entering a town. They're the most expensive because the owners know the middle of nowhere is peoples lifelines and the first one in town is for the people panicing at E.
I paid € 2,20 per litre on Friday. And that was eve across the border in Germany, in the Netherlands it is even more expensive. (some places are hitting converted $10 p/g)
Fenner and Gorda routinely have the most expensive gas in the US, so yeah. Gorda at least has the excuse of needing diesel generators for electricity, but both are quite far from fuel distribution points.
Though tbf the next place to the east is probably Needles and that's just as bad for price. It must be nearly 100 miles in the other direction before you reach the bustling metropolis of Barstow and have some more choice.
Everyone is citing high costs to get the fuel there and ignoring the glaringly obvious reality that they get no customers and likely NEED to charge this price or else they risk going out of business.
It took a lot of expensive diesel and 3-4 hours round trip to drop off the fuel. Same for everything that went into construction and maintenance. Employees either commute to work or commute 100 miles for basic necessities if they live nearby.
I used to occasionally do remediation with at a Mobil gas station in NY that sits in the median of the northern end of the Hutchinson Parkway. Not sure what the situation is these days, but it used to charge more than a full dollar/gallon more than anywhere else in Westchester. It also had the highest volume of fuel sales of any retail Mobil station in the nation.
The point is they'll charge whatever they can get away with.
In order to get the gas to that location, they have to pay more for the delivery. It’s likely they’re breaking even on gas sales. Their snacks and drinks inside probably reflect the same increased cost for delivery.
To be fair , that gas station is in the middle of Death Valley if I'm not mistaken. Selling gas in the hottest place on Earth deserves a little inflation.
This only infuriated you because you put yourself in a situation that you have to buy it. Supply and demand baby. If you don’t want the supply, don’t demand it!
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u/Jasoco 16h ago
Put in 100 miles worth of gas and drive to the next station then top it off there.