Tracking Costco gas prices

It can also get a lot worse very quickly when countries' strategic reserves run dry.

I don't see why. There is a global fuel crisis. It is affecting prices in much of the world. This particular page is about those prices in the US. The page's title, "Tracking Costco Gas Prices During a Global Fuel Crisis", describes exactly and accurately what it is doing.

Their $5 chicken now, that's a great "loss leader" (if it even is; that isn't confirmed). Because that forces you not just into the store, but all the way to the back. So you go in for the $5 chicken and leave with $20 of blueberries, $20 of cereal $20 of milk $20 of mayo.

It makes less sense in the suburbs.

Say you fill the car with 15 gallons, and they lose $0.25/gallon. That’s $3.75. If 1/3 of the gas station customers go in the store, they’re making $5.50 from retail, less the gas losses they net $1.75.

They make money, deny their competition business, and lock you mentally into saving money on gas and renewing that membership. That membership is half their operating income.

I’m probably being pessimistic. One thing with Costco is they are incredibly efficient, so I’m sure they’ve baked out cost and overhead. You can see stuff like how they provide the minimum number of garbage cans.

Where they win my Diet Coke business is that they are consistently a "good deal" - never the cheapest, but never the most expensive. And I don't need to wait for a sale to stock up.

I still buy soda from the local grocery stores when I happen by a deal when shopping for other things. But I don't go out of my way. The specials are usually much better than Costco though. By 25% or more per can.

Honestly this goes for most things I buy at Costco. Even in bulk, their per-unit costs beat the standard pricing at competitors - but never the sale prices. It just removes mental overhead. And the bulk prices are always better at a restaurant supply store. Where Costco wins in this area is curation so I can reduce mental load, but then again Costco does the bullshit where they stock something for 6mo out of the year and you spend an extra 20 minutes searching the store for it the next time you need it only realizing they stopped selling it. Then it appears randomly a month later.

They are a decent middle ground for me. I can buy 10lbs of chicken breast of decent quality for $2.99/lb I can toss directly into the freezer pre-packaged into meal-sized portions. Or I can buy 40lb boxes of bulk chicken breast for $1.39/lb from the supply store and spend a couple hours vacuum packaging it myself.

I definitely have a love/hate relationship with the place! I see Costco as the upper middle class consumerism version of nerd sniping.

They can twiddle with dropping a bit of price here and raising it somewhere else and still have the same ratio of cost.

Of course you can still think of things in terms of the cost per item versus the profit per item, but the stability of that ratio over many years makes me wonder if maybe Costco thinks of the membership fees that way.

Here's a good article: https://www.inc.com/bill-murphy-jr/how-costco-turns-loss-lea...

Currently I buy Shell gas b/c I trust that it's good for my car's engine. Can I trust that Costco's gas is as good as Shell's?

You have two main errors: 1) conflating refineries with terminals 2) forgetting that fuel is a fungible financial product.

There are terminals all over the country, within trucking distance of the stations they serve. Those terminals can be supplied by a nearby refinery, yes, but also one or more distant refineries connected to a pipeline or via ship, train, or barge. There is an entire swath of the energy market called "midstream" that handles this.

Once a refined fuel gets into a terminal, its refinery of origin stops really mattering for contract purposes because of swaps. Exxon can supply gasoline in one market while Marathon supplies an economically equivalent amount somewhere else. Nobody is moving “Exxon molecules”. I mean, it literally all goes into the same tank if it's the same product. They (the terminal) just keep track of who supplied how much. The detergent package is also mixed in at the terminal loading rack, along with ethanol in the case of gas, not at the refinery.

Also, very few states actually have specific rules. California is the only real pain in the butt. You might be thinking of summer vs. winter blends, where the refiners adjust the vapor pressure to reduce emission in the summer and to increase ease of engine starting in the winter. This is something every refinery can and easily does.

This means a couple of things: those places don't have 93, and the mileage you get out of a gallon is less.

I wish the government would ban 2 stroke engines (like leaf-blowers), which would have a much larger effect on air quality, vs using CA's oxygenated gas.

I'd love say that keeping an eye on gas prices and trying to time the market to buy on the right day are things that make poor use of my time. That sounds very nice.

I don't have the financial means to turn a blind eye to these kinds of costs, though. Things are rough over here.

I remember listening to AM talk radio back in the late 90's and a common trope was you'd get someone calling in ranting about gas prices and how they couldn't afford to take their kid on vacation due to current $president in the white house.

Even back in my early teens I'd pencil out the math and it'd be like a $20 price difference for 6 tanks of gas on their 800 mile round trip with the worst fuel efficiency you could imagine. I thought then - as I do now - that if $20 made a difference in you taking a vacation or not you couldn't afford it to begin with.

For most folks it's just an easy topic for people to rant about.

The only times I’ve seen it relatively empty were during bad storms.

That said, it’s not an hour wait. Around 20 minutes is average, but I rarely fill up there since I value my time much more than that.