Friday, October 5, 2012

Is it really worth the wait?

On my way home from GVSU today, I saw a lot of cars waiting at the pumps of a local gas station. My tank was half full, so I hadn't been paying attention to the prices at other stations, but $3.71 didn't seem like an especially low price-per-gallon. What did these people know that I didn't?


I began to wonder if it would be worth waiting in line to top of my tank. This got me thinking about all the information I would need to gather in order to make an informed judgement about whether or not it would be worth the wait. Here's some of what I gathered, in the form of pictures.


What else do I need to know in order to determine if it would have been worth it to stop for gas at the Admiral station?

1 comment:

  1. The second gas station photo certainly helps to understand 3.71 as a price, for those of us (like me) who don't use gallons or US currency. Though two data points doesn't necessarily let you know which one is the outlier (or maybe they both are?).

    The other thing that would be helpful to know is the trending of the prices over the last few days. For instance, I noticed at the start of this week that prices were about 1.27 (per litre), then midway through it was up to 1.30; I figured as I needed gas I should fill up, particularly given it wasn't likely to come back down given the Canadian long weekend. So naturally it's now 1.26. >.<

    Another thing that would be helpful in terms of "time is $" is how much gas you burn by idling the car waiting for a pump to free up. Particularly if they're slow pumps.

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