Another gasoline "stick it to the man" plan.

Daggar

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Jul 19, 2004
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Got this in an email. It reads sensibly. I wonder if it would have any effect.





Read to the end!!!


A man eats two eggs each morning for breakfast. When he goes to

the grocery store he pays 60 cents a dozen. Since a dozen eggs

won't last a week he normally buys two dozens at a time.


One day while buying eggs he notices that the price has risen to

72 cents.

The next time he buys groceries, eggs are .76 cents a dozen.

When asked to explain the price of eggs the store owner says,

"the price has gone up and I have to raise my price

accordingly".


This store buys 100 dozen eggs a day. I checked around for a

better price and all the distributors have raised their prices.

The distributors have begun to buy from the huge egg farms. The

small egg farms have been driven out of business.


The huge egg farms sells 100,000 dozen eggs a day to

distributors. With no competition, they can set the price as

they see fit. The distributors then have to raise their prices

to the grocery stores. And on and on and on. As the man kept

buying eggs the price kept going up. He saw the big egg trucks

delivering 100 dozen eggs each day. Nothing changed there.


He checked out the huge egg farms and found they were selling

100,000 dozen eggs to the distributors daily. Nothing had

changed but the price of eggs.


Then week before Thanksgiving the price of eggs shot up to $1.00

a dozen.

Again he asked the grocery owner why and was told, "cakes and

baking for the holiday". The huge egg farmers know there will be

a lot of baking going on and more eggs will be used. Hence, the

price of eggs goes up.

Expect the same thing at Christmas and other times when family

cooking, baking, etc. happen.


This pattern continues until the price of eggs is 2.00 a

dozen. The man says,"there must be something we can do about the

price of eggs".


He starts talking to all the people in his town and they decide

to stop buying eggs. This didn't work because everyone needed

eggs. Finally, the man suggested only buying what you need.


He ate 2 eggs a day. On the way home from work he would stop at

the grocery and buy two eggs. Everyone in town started buying 2

or 3 eggs a day.


The grocery store owner began complaining that he had too many

eggs in his cooler. He told the distributor that he didn't need

any eggs. Maybe wouldn't need any all week.


The distributor had eggs piling up at his warehouse. He told the

huge egg farms that he didn't have any room for eggs would not

need any for at least two weeks.


At the egg farm, the chickens just kept on laying eggs.


To relieve the pressure, the huge egg farm told the distributor

that they could buy the eggs at a lower price. The distributor

said, " I don't have the room for the %$&^*&% eggs even if they

were free".


The distributor told the grocery store owner that he would lower

the price of the eggs if the store would start buying again. The

grocery store owner said, "I don't have room for more eggs. The

customers are only buy 2 or 3 eggs at a time". "Now if you were

to drop the price of eggs back down to the original price, the

customers would start buying by the dozen again".


The distributors sent that proposal to the huge egg farmers.

They liked the price they were getting for their eggs but, them

chickens just kept on laying.


Finally, the egg farmers lowered the price of their eggs. But

only a few cents. The customers still bought 2 or 3 eggs at a

time. They said, "when the price of eggs gets down to where it

was before, we will start buying by the dozen."


Slowly the price of eggs started dropping. The distributors had

to slash their prices to make room for the eggs coming from the

egg farmers. The egg farmers cut their prices because the

distributors wouldn't buy at a higher price than they were

selling eggs for.


Anyway, they had full warehouses and wouldn't need eggs for

quite a while.


And them chickens kept on laying.


Eventually, the egg farmers cut their prices because they were

throwing away eggs they couldn't sell. The distributors started

buying again because the eggs were priced to where the stores

could afford to sell them at the lower price.


And the customers starting buying by the dozen again.


Now, transpose this analogy to the gasoline industry.


What if everyone only bought $10.00 worth of gas each time they

pulled to the pump. The dealers tanks would stay semi full all

the time. The dealers wouldn't have room for the gas coming from

the huge tank farms.

The tank farms wouldn't have room for the gas coming from the

refining plants. And the refining plants wouldn't have room for

the oil being off loaded from the huge tankers coming from the

Middle East.


Just $10.00 each time you buy gas. Don't fill it up. You may

have to stop for gas twice a week but, the price should come

down.


Think about it.



********************************** As an added note...When I buy

$10.00 worth of gas, that leaves my tank a little under half

full. The way prices are jumping around, you can buy gas for

$2.65 a gallon and then the next morning it can be $2.15. If you

have your tank full of $2.65 gas you don't have room for the

$2.15 gas. You might not understand the economics of only buying

two eggs at a time but, you can't buy cheaper gas if your tank

is full of the high priced stuff.


Also, don't buy anything else at the gas station, don't give

them any more of your hard earned money than what you spend on

gas, until the prices come down..


** Read this and send it on to as many people as you can!
 
MAYBE.. but it seems to me like that would just mean more trips to the gas station for me.. 10 dollars in only a smidge over 3 gallons which means Ill be going to the gas station AGAIN the next day.. either way they are going to sell the gas to me.

Eggs go bad fast.. gas does not. thats the main flaw in that analogy. No one is going to throw gas away because they have too much of it and its going bad.
 
True but I'm thinking it would cause a backlog at the refineries. I mean... The tanker trucks aren't going to deliver partial truckloads. On the other hand, even if EVERYONE did this, then you're right... they'd just be making more trips back and forth to fill up and it wouldn't effect the amount of gas sold in a day after the first few days. Folks would be taking less gas per trip but there would be allot more people at the pump each day.

Thinking about it now, it seems like a good way to accomplish little more than making long lines at the pump.
 
I don't understand how if you only buy half tank instead of a full tank it will help anything. Sure you are only buying half the gas, but you are buying twice as much. To do any real change you have to stop using so much gas, buy energy efficient appliances, turn off the lights when you leave rooms, buy cars that run on corn. Buying gas twice a week instead of once won't help anything, only waste another 15 minutes a week at the gas station...
 
I doubt it will work. Plus when I fill up my tank i can last on a full tank for about 2 wks, but once i get under half tank, it drops down to empty in a few days, and i will go through 10 bucks a day no joke. Though for me i dont have enough money to put 40 bucks to fill it up every 2 wks, so i do the what i need thing anyways, for other people it may be harder on them.
 
I really dont see the logic, if your buying say $150 a month in gas, to do what you need to do, it doestn matter if you buy it everyday or once a week. The gas station is still selling xxxx gallons a month. Does any one else see have trouble with this logic???? The only way to do it is to buy less gas per month, period. But that wont work because if your like me, you only buy enough gas to get you to work and back and thats pretty much it. Im back to spending $110 to fill up my F250, so I dont go anywhere I dont have to.
 
Not going to work, you cause a slow down at the refinary level, they cut down or shutdown the plant. To tighten the supply demand equation. Our oil prices are being driven by fear of storms, wars or anything else that makes the markets skittish. The plant (not oil, but rather petrochemical) I work at doesn't like to operate below a certain level its not cost effective, but rather then shutdown we idle units until needed, and lay off workers.
 
makes no sense to me... Sure, you only buy a bit at a time, but the demand does not go down at all since you dont cut down on the overall amount of gas you use. All you'd be doing is making more trips to the pump. Throughout the story they never cut down on egg usage, only travelled more often to buy the eggs, hence the demand would not change at all, and neither would the price.
 
I think it's the Chinese. They have a new found love of omelettes. They are using too many eggs. Also, the environmentalists are jacking with the chicken farms and not allowing the chickens to produce eggs to keep up with demand. Also, if we could use our own (U.S.) chickens to produce eggs instead of those arab chickens, maybe the cost would be better.

I think I'll just not eat as many eggs. Maybe this will help with cholesterol.
 
Drop-in-the-bucket plan. Not enough people are ever going to cooperate with it, because 1. The general public is a mass of idiots that wouldn't understand the idea, even when explained thoroughly as above, 2. The general public is lazy and are too used to just filling 'er up to the top to break their ways, 3. In order for the plan to work, pretty much EVERYONE would have to follow it to really make a difference at all, and that's never going to happen, and 4. It still doesn't quite add up in any way other than general reduction of consumption, which is what most people are trying to do, anyways.

If people only buy ten bucks of gas at a time, over a certain period of time, they're still going to consume the same amount of fuel as long as they're driving the same number of miles in that time, and therefore there's no true effect of reduction of demand. Gasoline is NOT going to just back up in the refineries because folks are only buying it ten bucks at a time; rather, the idea would work backwards in the sense that gas stations would be seeing an INCREASE in the number of sales per week. Add it up: if you have to make more stops for gas per week, that equates to more transactions, and a higher number of transactions means (to oil executives who only look at numbers) a higher customer count. They'll think that there's an increase in demand, and therefore they'll have yet another reason to INCREASE the prices, thus the plan negates its own purpose.

Looks good on paper, but like most of these "stick it to the man" ideas, they never quite have a way of really panning out...