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The price of gas gives a lot of people heartburn.
Driving around Tucson, or even in the county, one can find great differences in what you might pay for a gallon of gas.
Some complainers allege “price gouging” is going on in Cochise County.
According to the Arizona Attorney General’s Office, price gouging is generally defined as “an attempt by a vendor to charge unreasonably high prices for goods or services that are in short supply during an emergency situation or a disaster. Shortages of necessary goods or services can occur for a wide variety of reasons, including a pipeline break, fire, flood, hurricane, earthquake or terrorist attack.”
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More than half the states have price gouging laws, but Arizona does not. So even if such an emergency occurred, Arizonans would be out of luck.
The attorney general’s Web site goes on to further ask, “What can the Attorney General’s Office do about gas prices?”
There are no price regulations on gasoline in Arizona. It is not illegal to sell gasoline for high prices, unless there is some other illegal activity involved.
Such illegal activities could include price fixing, which means an agreement by competitors to set prices. Well, that’s not happening in the county, as witnessed by the different prices all around the area.
There is also monopolization, where a corporation controls the market for goods or services and takes anti-competitive action to maintain its dominance. An example: A dominant gas station ownership drops its prices so low as to force its competitor out of business.
That’s sure not happening.
The attorney general writes, “Consumers may suspect that because gasoline stations raise or lower their prices at or around the same time, they are fixing prices. Within a geographic market, prices often move more or less together, rising quickly and falling slowly as the companies move both interdependently and independently. This is called ‘parallel pricing’ and is not illegal unless there is proof of collusion or an agreement to fix prices.”
Good luck to you on proving that one.
So, by now we know you don’t want to hear about how lucky we are we don’t live in Europe, where a gallon of gas is triple the price. Or how we need to get off our addiction to foreign oil to ultimately solve this problem.
You would probably like to find out where gas prices are lowest around the state. You can do so online at http://www.gasbuddy.com/Gas_Prices/Arizona/index.aspx.
The attorney general does state it will prosecute violations of antitrust or consumer fraud laws.
If you think there’s a problem, you can go online and send the attorney general a gas pricing complaint form by using this link: http://www.azag.gov/consumer/gasoline/gascomplaint.html.
Or you can clip the form on Page A9 and mail it to the Attorney General’s Office.
In any case, don’t expect anything to really happen. Gas, like other commodities, can be bought and sold for whatever price a business chooses to sell it.
Isn’t capitalism great?
FYI wrote on Nov 4, 2008 10:06 AM: