What about driving 5 miles to save $0.30/gallon?
My point is that I have never seen such a difference in pricing within such a small distance. How are they able to charge so much per gallon without it being gouging?
I'll do that. One of the reasons I use reward points from different vendors. But one person's "gouging" is another person's maximization of profit in response to demand. When you're a little station with one pump, you find a reasonable price - when you're a Wawa with twenty pumps, you charge something else. They could "gouge" and charge another dollar, but they'd lose business.
When I lived in New England, my boss lived in Lynn MA and close to two gas stations, same company but on opposite sides of the same divided highway - since it was very hard to cross easily without going all around grandma's barn - they often had DIFFERENT prices, even though they were, say, both Shell stations.
And they CHANGED them during the day. To take advantage of traffic volume - more people, more customers.
I'm guessing that transport and other costs figure into it, although if I were a gas station, I'd charge slight discount rates on and from the route to the base - because of volume. Elsewhere, I would charge as much as I could.
I can only see "gouging" as a problem when there are no alternatives - or easily accessible alternatives - and it's something you depend on. When two gas stations a few miles apart charge different prices, hard to call it gouging, because you can just go to the other one. When McDonald's charges ten bucks for a Big Mac, it's not gouging, because no one needs one.
I don't think gouging happens much, in a competitive market. Way too easy to lose your shirt. Kamala is only promoting that idea, because a) it sells to her base that big companies are meanies that charge too much for stuff and b) she would otherwise have to admit that four years of Bidenomics and ruinous treatment of the oil industry has led to inflation.
