When the state Attorney General’s Office announced recently that more than 300 gas stations across New Jersey were found to be in violation of laws related to pricing, octane rating and accuracy of equipment, it was disturbing for two reasons.
First, nobody likes to be played for a sucker. Especially when consumers are shelling out $4 a gallon at the gas pump, the last thing they want to hear is that the pump is inaccurate, the octane rating is wrong, or the guy pumping the gas is ripping them off.
Second, it gave motorists an excuse to cast misplaced blame on gas station owners and operators for the plight in which we all find ourselves — paying record-breaking prices to fill up our tanks.
The station owners and operators thus joined the big oil companies, the petroleum speculators, the rising middle class in China and India, and the oil-producing nations of the world as the targets of our collective road rage. Initially, it was the Venezuelans, the Nigerians and especially the Arabs who were to blame for the meteoric rise in the price of gasoline. They were the ones who were keeping supplies low, even in the face of rising demand, in order to dig deeper into the pockets of American motorists.
Then it was the Chinese and the Indians, whose growing middle class was suddenly competing with America’s for petroleum products to power their cars, their homes and their industries.
Then it was the speculators, who were bidding up the price of oil in the futures market, looking to make a killing when the price of a barrel of oil went from $100 to $110 to $120 to $130 and beyond.
Then it was the oil companies, who were making ever-growing profits (usually described as “obscene”) as consumers were spending more and more to fill up their tanks.
And now it’s the owners and operators of gas stations, who are charging us more, giving us less and otherwise bilking us for whatever hard-earned money we haven’t already given over to the Middle Eastern potentates, the Chinese and Indians, the speculators and the oil companies.
If only this were true.
If only the violations found by the Attorney General’s Office were so severe that cracking down on them really would save us all a few pennies a gallon at the gas pumps. But they weren’t. The most common violation was a meter being out of tolerance by more than six cubic inches. This was followed closely by the posted per-gallon price being different on each side of the pump. Then came the octane rating label not being posted, the octane rating being posted inaccurately and multiple price changes in a 24-hour period. Only a handful of the violations were for charging motorists more than they should have paid.
This is not to say that the Attorney General’s Office is wasting its time monitoring New Jersey’s gas stations. Far from it. Because we’re paying so much these days at the pump, we deserve to know the pump is giving us an accurate reading. But enforcing the state’s weights-and-measures laws isn’t going to bring gasoline prices back down to earth. Neither is going after speculators, or slapping a windfall profits tax on oil companies, or drilling in the Alaska wilderness or along the Outer Continental Shelf.
Let’s face it: The era of cheap gasoline is over. There is no quick fix, nor is there any point in assigning greater blame to easy targets than is properly assigned to ourselves. We, the American motorists, are by far the most profligate consumers of a finite resource that is becoming more valuable — and more costly — with the passage of time. And the sooner we stop looking for scapegoats, the better we can start adapting to this reality.
