New way to protest high gas prices

Poststructural Pub
1

There’s a new type of protest. Instead of not buying gas on a particular day, the idea is to boycott permanently one of the main oil companies - in Canada, the target of the boycott is Shell and its affiliate Petro-Canada.

The idea is that if a significant number of people boycott Shell/PC for a long period of time (say 6 months), then that company will have to lower its prices or suffer huge losses. If it lowers its prices, it’ll start a price war with other oil companies, and the consumer will benefit.

Not a bad idea. Is it being done in any other countries?

2

I haven’t heard of anything like that here.

For my own amusement this weekend I worked out the British gas/petrol prices in terms of US dollars per gallon. It came out to $6.57. Makes $3 sound cheap..

I’d love to see a gasoline boycott for six months in the states, but I don’t think most Americans would be willing to change their lifestyle enough to accomodate it. I know I wouldn’t have been able to. In Utah last year I had a choice of driving 25 minutes to work or getting up two hours early to catch a series of busses.

3

It just always seems a little weird to give business to somebody else who is part of the problem, too. How do you pick who really deserves it?

4

The issue isn’t the absolute cost, it’s the cost relative to a) what one would normally expect to pay and b) as a proportion of income.

I suspect Europeans have both higher absolute incomes and typically budget more of it for gas. So when a price surge hits, it hits both sides of the atlantic about the same. Of course this is just speculation.

5

Pick the biggest. If there’s a price war, it makes sense to have the biggest company start it.

Obviously this won’t work well in remote areas where there may only be one or two service stations, but in the cities (where these companies make their money), boycotting the biggest company, be it Shell or whoever, six months would put enormous pressure on them.

BTW, just to clarify, this isn’t a blanket boycott of all gas stations. People will continue to buy gas, just not in the service stations of a particular company.

6

i boycotted EXON in 1992 :moreevil:, i guess forever.
moral issues though, not money.

7

That’s what I say; in an industry where supply is nearly all one-sided, what sense does it make to starve one company and fatten another, when they’re both buying the same crude to refine…
If this tactic were used to drive one company down in price (theoretically speaking) that company might (again, in theory) go under, and thus reduce the number of petrolium companies versus ammount of crude available. The rest of the companies must raise their prices in order to purchase or build more refineries to keep up with the hole in end-user supply demand (because demand will rise with the elimination of a providor, thus creating an opportunity for expansion in the other companies, which expansion will cost money), thus increasing the overal price of gasoline in the US and Canada.
The only way to reduce the overall price of gasoline is to reduce the overall value of crude oil. In plain English, if you want to reduce the price of gasoline, you have to universally reduce demand for gasoline in general.
In planer English, use less gasoline.
In plainer-er English, if you wanna make a difference, sell that big damn pickup truck/SUV/large displacement engined luxury car that you probably dont really need and buy a small, gas efficient vehicle.

Again…the only way for the consumer of any good to manipulate the price of said good in a free market atmosphere is to manipulate the properties of it’s supply and demand.

Use less gas.

8

It’s a stupid idea. The price of gas is a reflection of demand, not anything that the oil companies have control over.

If you want gas prices to come down, switch your SUV to a compact or take the bus.

Nothing but a permenent change in demand is going budge alter the price of oil.

Silly “we can get something for nothing” schemes are useless.

9

Speculation indeed. I’ve never understood where the “Europeans are richer and so make provisions to budget for it” notions come from. The same kind of fallacy popped up in another thread about petrol prices.

10

Oh Oh! I hope you didn’t have any off eggs today. I’m heading for the hills.

11
12

Hehe. I did have a hardboiled egg today, come to think of it! But nope, my mood is fine. I am pleasantly knackered from a v.splendid weekend in excellent company.

But anyway… here’s a jolly good link for anyone interested in comparing the cost of living between major cities around the globe. Ireland does not come off very well, as I’m sure Peter Laban and others have already mentioned:

http://www.finfacts.com/costofliving.htm


Well worth a mooch!

13

Hi Wormdiet

The per capta GDP of the UK is roughly $30k, that of the US is roughly $40k. We get it in the neck both ways, higher prices and lower wages.

David

14

One of the best ‘cost of living’ comparisons I’ve seen details how long you had to work to buy certain items twenty years ago and how long you have to work for them now. It can throw up a few surprises.

15

I throw up a few surprises after too many pints :open_mouth:

No really, though…it is interesting, I can even gauge how the cost of living has increased in just the time since I was able to drive…
back then, gas cost less than seventy cents per gallon…

16

Let’s not forget our very own petrol protests back in 2000. Non-violent, nearly crippled the country. Not that it ultimately did much good, except perhaps to let Blair know that ‘one wronged man can move a people, and a wronged people can move the world…’

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK_fuel_protest

Since then, of course, the price at the pumps has shot through the levels which triggered the protests 5 years ago.

17

I think a lot of people are missing the point here. Supply isn’t the problem. Most oil companies are recording record profits - check their SEC filings if you don’t believe me.

No one company is going to allow itself to go broke. It’ll lower its prices. The point is to target one large company and force it to decide between bankruptcy and lowering its prices. Once it lowers its prices, the boycott finishes and everyone will start buying its gas. The other companies will then have to follow suit.

18

Personally, I’m all for higher gas prices. The world would be a better and cleaner place if gas were $10 or $20 a gallon, although obviously it would be better for the economy, taxi drivers, and low-income folks if the price increase were gradual to give people time to switch to new technologies.

The price of gas has been artificially low for decades anyway. It has never reflected the significant external costs associated with it, such as the costs of pollution and other environmental damage, or the cost of wars fought over oil. We pay for those things out of our income taxes and thus we have no incentive to use less oil.

19

Supply is exactly the problem.

If more people want your product than you can produce product, you have to ration it out. In a market economy, rationing is accomplished by increasing price to choke off demand until you manage to exactly align the number of willing buyers with the amount of product available.

If, like the oil companites, you happen to be own some of whatever’s in short supply, you make windfall profits when this occurs. You still can’t sell for less than the market price, because the moment you do, you’ll have two (or more) buyers for every barrel of oil. This will cause problems–which one do you sell to?

SO if the oil companies decide to sell gas for less than the market price, they’ll have two buyers for every gallon of gas they have to sell. In a lot of places, that’ll lead to shortages or riots at the pumps.

Do you wanna live in a world like the soviet union, in which you have to line up for an hour on tuesday mornings at 11 to buy gas; they don’t announce it in advance; and if you miss it, there won’t be another chance to buy for week or more? Unless you’re connected, of course. Then you can always get gas.

20

No you’re right, demand is the problem, and demand is unnavoidably linked to the supply, however much profit is being made in the middle.

No one company is going to allow itself to go broke. It’ll lower its prices.

true that a company may not allow itself to go broke, the may turn to a buyout by a company you’re not boycotting, hence a return to the original problem. A selective boycott will not neccesarily end one company, but it will not lower the universal end-user cost of gas.

The point is to target one large company and force it to decide between bankruptcy and lowering its prices.

meanwhile, the other companies can see what’s going on and elevate their prices in accordance because guess what…you’ve just magically inreased the demand for their gasoline!

Once it lowers its prices, the boycott finishes and everyone will start buying its gas. The other companies will then have to follow suit.

Once the boycott ends, providing you could successfully induce them to lower their individual price, there’s no guarantee they wont re-raise their prices after the fact…If your boycott is not successful, you have cost the industy more money than if you were to simply reduce your consumption, and guess what…price increase on the end-user level.
On top of that, if you goof up your protest effort and you fail, you ruin any credibility that the notion had in the first place, thus reducing future chances of success.
Remember that while your non-boycotted gas companies are in competition with the one that you (giving you the broad benefit of the doubt) have boycotted and theoretically lowered their prices, the one you have lowered is in competition with the rest of them too; this means you might, in the best case scenario, (again, going out on a very thin limb here) experience a very brief downward flux in prices, but as demand for the cheaper gas increaces, price will also increase as their stations start to run out of thier gas…gas is not refined overnight, but demand will spike so much in this type of situation that the cheaper stations will inevitably sell out of their product and force consumers away in their constant need for more gas.

Your intentions are well placed, but you need to be better informed about the way that capitalist economies and free enterprise works before you start into any such endeavour…You are looking at this situation from the premise that the consumer is in control; you are absolutely correct!!! the consumer does control the market, because the consumer controlls the overall demand for the end product…
Such a boycott could only be successful if it is universal in nature. Do we have the technology yet to go cold-turkey from gasoline? No, not yet, but we do have the ability to reduce our overall consumption, and that’s where our control lies.
again, the only way for the end-user to control the price of any good is to reduce the overal, universal demand for the good. In terms of petrolium, this means using less gasoline. Do we have the technology to do this? Yes. Unfortunatly the north american mentality of “bigger is better is more” and thinking they can get something for nothing spoils the average consumer into apathy and allows them to think “Well, if it’s just me driving my big gass guzzler around, it wont make much difference.”
Use less gas…
do you know why?
There is an agent that they put in gasoline to cause it’s effectiveness to decay; they do this to discourage the consumer from stockpiling…
they have to sell this gas or it will go bad on them…a boycott of one company, however successful it may seem on the outside, will not stop the boycotted company from selling it’s gasoline to its competitors…a universal reduction in consumption would mean these companies could not sell their gasoline back and forth on a profit, they would need the end-user consumer to buy their gas, and that would cause a universal price reduction.
If the end-user consumer were to make a permanent reduction in their consumption, this would be a permanent price decrease that would stabilize over time.