Ah, those were the days...

...when we thought $2.00 for a gallon of gas was high. Seems like only yester-year. :-(

I'm not really that old yet, but I find myself falling in the same storytelling that we used to joke with my dad about. His was about walking 5 miles to school each day...uphill...both ways...in 3 feet of snow...with no shoes. Another was working at his first job - Dairy Queen I think, for $0.25 an hour. Mine now involves recalling fondly my Junior year in high school when gas prices dropped to $0.68 a gallon - a mere 20% of the national average cost of a gallon of regular today!

Find out more about the average gas prices in your area via AAA, or find the cheapest stations via Gas Price Watch or my favorite Gas Buddy.

A little, ok BIG, pet peeve of mine is the way that stations will jump 20+ cents in a day, and then drop back down the next day. I know it's all about supply and demand (and greed), but I would like to think that a station that exhibited fair pricing practices would get more business in the end. Only increase retail prices when their wholesale prices rose. I'm not blaming the stations directly, I know that even they don't completely control price at the pump, but...

The only way that we're gonna get lower gas prices now is to reduce the demand -- that part is in our control. "They" will control the supply to balance out the gains we make, but at least we can say that we're doing something about it. I'm not a fan of the "gas boycott" email that gets passed around all the time because it's not a boycott -- it's a deferment. The station owners know that the next day after the boycott, they'll simply have higher sales. The only way that we can change things is to be smart about the way we're using the supply. The sites above have a number of ideas to help. To shameless paraphrase a tag line from the TV show Heros -- "save the gallon...save the world..."