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 News from Around the Americas | May 2006 
Expensive Gas? Cost is No Concern in Beverly Hills
 Bernie Woodall - Reuters
| | Attendants service an automobile near a sign advertising the price of gasoline to be $4.12 per gallon in Beverly Hills, California May 9, 2006. (Robert Galbraith/Reuters) |
A couple of attendants washed the windows, checked the tires and pumped $4.299-a-gallon premium into a behemoth Cadillac Escalade as digit counters zoomed toward $100.
"I don't even look at the price," said the SUV driver, Michele Best of Beverly Hills, at the full-service pumps of a throwback gas station with very modern prices.
"Don't tell my husband."
Across from Beverly Hills City Hall, the Union 76 outlet is known as the "Station of the Stars" because movie icons like Jimmy Stewart and Jimmy Durante filled up there in the 1950s.
"It's $98.55, for 22.9 gallons," said Best. "But I conserve by not driving much. I only drive a little and always in my neighborhood. You'd have to be rich to drive to work."
One need not be in tony Beverly Hills to experience sticker shock at California gas pumps, even at the cheaper self-serve ones.
Wednesday's U.S. national average gasoline price was $2.89 a gallon for self-serve regular, according to the AAA motor club, down a cent from Tuesday.
But as retail prices cooled a little last week over most of the country, California's kept rising.
A month ago, the difference between California's price for regular and the national average price was less than 14 cents. On Wednesday, the car-happy state was 42 cents more expensive than the national average, the Web site gasbuddy.com said.
Strict environmental regulations, the lack of a pipeline connection to Gulf Coast refineries and high taxes help keep California's gasoline price aloft.
PROFITS AND PRICES
Drivers often curse high pump prices, but retailers have a smaller profit margin than crude producers, refiners, or commodity funds that profit by pushing up futures prices, said Dale Boyett, president of Modesto, California-based independent fuel wholesaler and retailer Boyett Petroleum.
Boyett says Big Oil is getting its share, but energy has become "the latest Internet bubble ... and it makes no sense. It's not tied to the (supply-and-demand) fundamentals."
The United States imports 60 percent of its oil needs and there is always a fear element in the market, because of the hot spots that produce oil, he said. This month it's Iran. Next month it may be Venezuela or Nigeria.
"I don't know how to stop it, unless the market falls and everybody loses," he said.
As the Cadillac Escalade in Beverly Hills filled up for almost $100, a Venezuelan cab driver this week filled his 1976 Chevy Nova for $2.30 at only 12 cents per gallon.
And in much of Europe, high taxes result in double the U.S. gasoline price.
The landmark Union 76 station in Beverly Hills with the picturesque saddle-style awning over its gas pumps doesn't even have the area's highest prices.
Gasbuddy.com showed regular self-serve at $3.92 a gallon at a station near Interstate 5 in northern Los Angeles. |
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