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Difficulty filling full gas tanks are just the beginning of the rising gas prices which have forced many people to cut back on vacations and other areas of spending.
Gas prices bring a grimace to anyone’s face these days with the prices gradually climbing higher and higher and no end in sight.
It started out gradually, but now gas is reaching a price that is causing people to start asking questions and taking action, especially through social networking Websites like Facebook. Several groups and events have been formed to combat rising gas prices through various ways from not buying gas for a day to not buying gas from oil companies like Exxon Mobil Corp. and Mobil Corp. Sarah Thompson from Greensboro, N.C., had a similar idea and started the Facebook event “No Gas Day.”
According to Thompson, the event started in the beginning of March and was a result of the growing frustration of gas prices and Thompson and her family having a hard time getting by because of it. Even so, it was a specific occurence that fueled the start of Thompson’s “No Gas Day.”
“I had to go out of town for my father’s surgery and ended up having to buy three tanks of gas that pay period instead of my usual one and it really sank us,” Thompson said. “After reflecting how much we’d spend on food and groceries as well because those prices have gone up due to gas because of shipping into the stores, I just decided I wanted to do something about it.”
The Facebook group has more than 1 million people attending the event, which will occur on March 31. According to Thompson, for one day, people will avoid getting gas and hoping the enormous influence of Facebook will help with that.
“Facebook is kind of like a dividing cell, you send it to two or three people and they send it to two or three people, and it really spreads quickly that way,” Thomson said. “I only originally sent it to my 370 friends that I personally have on my Facebook and just said ‘Spread the word.’ Within two weeks we had a million people.”
However, fuel prices do not only affect individuals, but businesses and institutions, including Augusta State University. According to Karl Munschy, director of business services, who is in charge of a variety of tasks, including maintaining the finances of the Augusta State shuttle buses and the fuel that runs them, gas prices have affected them.
Even though gas prices have not gone high enough to affect what students have to pay, and won’t for quite a while, Munschy said, there have been changes in the budgeting of gas with the costs of the shuttle buses, according to the contract Augusta State has with Horizon Motor Coach, which supplies the shuttle buses.
“We get an extra charge on our invoice for the fuel and we’ve been getting an extra charge most of this year, actually all of this year, since July 1 because fuel prices have been so high,” Munschy said. “We budgeted that in, in the beginning, so right now we’re OK.”
However, the rising gas prices did not just come out of nowhere. According to Jurgen Brauer, professor of economics, the increasing gas prices is mostly based on expectation.
“If the oil trader believes that tomorrow they can’t get any oil, they demand more oil today,” Brauer said. “Whenever there’s more demand, the price goes up and so that higher price that is passed on to the oil companies and to the refineries and to the consumer for gasoline for the car.”
The climbing gas prices are primarily affected by the situation in Libya, Africa, with the rebellions and the expectation that the situation will worsen, spill over into other oil-rich countries, like Saudi Arabia, and decrease the oil supply, Brauer said.
“The oil traders who secure the supplies ahead of time then can sell it for really high prices,” Brauer said. “It’s basically market psychology where people try to anticipate what happens in the future and bring the future into the present so we won’t have quite as high prices in the future by having some higher prices now.”
However, many Americans are still struggling with the gradually rising gas prices and have caused people to cut back on expenditures and vacations to accommodate the cost of this necessity. However, people, like Thompson, have fought back against this situation.
“I just wanted (“No Gas Day”) to be more of a wakeup call, that something needs to be done,” Thompson said. “I think capitalism has kind of run amuck in this country, and capitalism goes both ways and (people) decide what we think is a fair product, not them.”