One plus one equals two. Except when you are in the business of setting gas prices. In that environment, one plus one seems to rely on some mystical cosmic constant that changes without anyone knowing. Honestly, this is a simple practice. Why is it always wrong?

This week, all of the maritime provinces, had their gas prices hikes at the pump. All jurisdictions have prices set by “independent third parties” like the Utilites and Review Board in Nova Scotia. Well, boys and girls of the review boards, here is a simple math lesson for you. Through July the NY harbour spot price for gasoline hovered in the $3.08 ( per US gallon or 4 litres ) range for most of the month. Then in early August the price plummeted to a low of $2.64. It stabilized at about $2.71 for a week. That is a 14% drop. A resulting drop at the pumps would have been 18.5 cents. Did we see that? No. We got seven cents instead. Last week the prices rose and averaged about $2.81. Still almost nine percent below July’s prices. That should correspond to prices 11.7 cents lower than the July price.

Instead we get a price hike of 5 cents!!! Whaaaaaat! Yup. So we are now paying pump prices that are 2% lower than July while the wholesale price is nine percent lower. There really hasn’t been any change in the exchange rate so that isn’t an issue. I don’t get it. I could do this in my sleep yet the consumer always seems to get the short end of the hose. I see a fair pump price in Nova Scotia at $1.185 per litre. Or more specifically you are overpaying by almost 10 cents per litre.

I am sure they will correct this error and give our money back.

Until then, I remain,

A Sour Kraut

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This entry was posted on Friday, August 19th, 2011 at 11:56 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.