The slow learners running our petroleum puzzle game are at it again.<\/p>\n
What they fail to realize is that Americans are on a zero-tolerance fuse these days. <\/p>\n
In the old days, there was give-and-take with the price. It was a well-known secret: Gas went up when the summer holidays started, came back down when the summer ended. <\/p>\n
But now there’s a psychological tipping point associated with the price of gas. It started out at about four dollars a gallon, but now I think it’s closer to two– between recession woes, sky-high unemployment, and the addtional debt loaded onto the back of the taxpayers, people aren’t putting up with any BS.<\/p>\n
Every time the slow learners raise the gas price too far, too fast, or with too flimsy an excuse, a whole new clot of people decides to bite the bullet and trade in their SUVs and their pickups and their sedans, and instead buy gas-sipping motorcycles or scooters– or learn that renting an economical car for long trips isn’t all that bad– or just learn to do without.<\/p>\n
In other words, once that chunk of demand is gone, it’s gone for good. It won’t be back in the fall just because the price of gas returned to normal.<\/p>\n
That’s not a happy business model in anyone’s book.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The slow learners running our petroleum puzzle game are at it again. What they fail to realize is that Americans are on a zero-tolerance fuse these days. In the old days, there was give-and-take with the price. It was a well-known secret: Gas went up when the summer holidays started, came back down when the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-708","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ramblings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lucas-photo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/708","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lucas-photo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lucas-photo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lucas-photo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lucas-photo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=708"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lucas-photo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/708\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lucas-photo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=708"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lucas-photo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=708"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lucas-photo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=708"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}