Memo to the Oil Companies

Who’d have thought that just four months later gas prices would be down about fifty percent? Most people thought that the public would never see cheap gas again. Life as we knew it was going to change. Fortunately, for my pocket and your pocket they were wrong. A quick visit to Bloomberg.com will have some academic answers, but it’s not that complicated.
For the last 15 years, the American public has for the most part driven big gas guzzling vehicles. Throughout the nineties, GMC and Ford manufactured large SUV’s and trucks that the average Joe scooped up to drive around town in. Gas was cheap, so it didn’t matter that Average Joe’s Ford Expedition got 11 miles to the gallon. In December of 1998, the average gas price was just below $1. Everyone was buying ridiculous, stupid, and gigantic vehicles. Prices spiked a little bit from 2000 to 2005 but it remained relatively practical to drive a guzzler.
Then in August of 2005, everything changed. Suddenly, Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf of Mexico and gas went from being about $2.49 a gallon to about $3.39 a gallon. Since then, oil companies continue to claim that the prices were justified, but I think it’s a heaping pile of horse shit. Hurricanes have been devastating the Gulf of Mexico since Pangea broke up, and the continents formed into the shape they are today. How come gas prices weren’t affected by hurricane’s in the 1990’s? It sounds to me like the 2005 price spike was not a result of hurricane damage but more like an experiment by the oil companies to see if Average Joe would pay over $3 for a gallon of gas. It worked. Exxon/Mobil was reporting record quarterly profits for the next few years, and up until now.
From 2005 until now, prices spiked every summer. They would drop down to about $2.49 in the winter and go up into the $3 range during the summer. However, in the summer of 2008, the oil companies fucked up. There’s no other way to put it. They fucked up. Gas prices actually hit $5 a gallon in some places. The public was angry. And their anger was justified. There’s nothing like spending a ton of your money on gas that’s sold to you by a company that profits by over $40 billion dollars a year. But lately, it seems like one of the most coveted qualifications in a CEO is that he or she has to be out of touch with the the general public and really stupid. How did these companies think that the American economy could sustain under the weight of $5 a gallon gasoline? Well, they managed to postulate that by being completely out of touch with the general public. The high prices of fuel forced the prices of every tangible object sold in the world to increase by a lot. Average Joe and every other person that’s literate can understand that simple economic concept. Now, the public was insanely angry at the oil companies. Here’s a tip for any CEO running an oil company: don’t piss off your customers dummy! Everyone parked their big gas guzzlers and bought hybrids or economical four door sedans. Let’s do a little math. If the average person burned twenty gallons a week in their guzzlers, now they’re probably burning about seven gallons a week in their economy car. Multiple that number by all of the people that got rid of their guzzlers and the product equals big bucks!
Fuck you Exxon/Mobil. I’m glad you had to lower the price of oil. Of course, they’ll continue to pretend that they have no control over the price and that it’s based on market conditions. But we all know that is complete bullshit. In fact, one could argue that if a business didn’t have some level of control over the price of their product they’d go out of business faster than gas prices go up. It looks like the oil companies shot themselves in the foot this summer. Too bad they didn’t shoot themselves in the head. It’s hard to fathom $3 a gallon gas next summer. The national MPG average will probably go up quite a bit. This past summer American’s waved goodbye to their guzzlers and welcomed economy cars and hybrid models. Even some of the big trucks are hybrids that are getting two to three times more miles to the gallon. That’s really impacting all of the oil companies. They like to tickle their asses and tell themselves that the price of fuel is down because the economy is bad, but I’m not driving any less. We all still have to go to work. We all still have to drive. Memo to all of you all CEO’s: we’re not driving less, we’re driving cars that don’t drink as much fuel. But you’re all too stupid to realize that. Have fun on your yachts this holiday season, we’ll all be hoping there’s a hell just so you all can burn in it.