Uh-oh. It's another gas-out day today.
You didn't know that? Yes, floating around the internet, in e-mails and on message boards, is a familiar notice, seen several times in the past few years, urging US drivers not to buy gasoline on May 15. The idea is that such enormous pressure will so cripple "the oil companies" (a relatively ill-defined term) that they will be forced to reduce their prices. In fact, the posters boast, a similar one-day boycott in 1997 (or maybe it was 1999... it's not entirely clear) pulled down prices 30 cts/gal overnight. Wow! (The Barrel declines to check our pricing records to determine the veracity of this claim. We have doubts).
But there's one difference this time around. In prior calls to arms, these letters actually said something to the effect of "buy gas a day before the gas-out, buy gas the day after the gas-out, but not on the day itself." The idea, apparently, was that unchanged total demand could be disguised as lower demand, and prices could be tricked into dropping. Apparently, the forces behind the gas-out think that 86 million barrels of oil consumed around the world every day is one big sucker waiting to be had.
The most recent letter doesn't have this sentence. It's almost as if the authors either forgot to include it, or maybe they realized how ridiculous it is. It seems somebody concluded that all but telling the users to keep their demand steady and just alter their supply patterns, yet having an impact on prices, might look a tad silly.
But if there's some comfort to be taken from this, it's the reaction on some of the message boards to the idea that prices can be moved even when supply and demand are unaltered. It isn’t put quite like that, but as ncclyde of Charlotte, North Carolina, put it: old news, and it doesn't work. All that this type of thing does is cause people to purchase their gas on the day before or the day after, having a net effect of ZERO on gas consumption.
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