Last May, I wrote a column bemoaning that my white whale of a Ford 150 pickup had all the resale value of the ubiquitous exercise equipment you see at yard sales.
Drive by a yard sale at the end of the day, and chances are the used dishes and pots and pans and tools, and even the portraits of Elvis on velvet have been snapped up. But the stationary bike, the free weights and the treadmill are still sitting on the driveway, like wallflowers at a junior high sock hop.
That was how it was for used, gas-guzzling pickups and SUVs last spring. Gas cost so much per gallon you had to be Warren Buffett to afford to fill them up, and even if you had maintained it lovingly and changed the oil every 3,000 miles, you could hardly give your used pickup away — let alone get enough for it to make the down payment on a nondescript shoebox car that looked as ugly as a wart on a pickle and had the personality of Wally Cox, but got 30 mpg.
That column drew a lot of reader response. Some of it, admittedly, was from people who damned me for a planet-killing reprobate for buying a four-wheel-drive, gas-sucking monster in New Jersey, where you seldom need to go off-roading. And there was that one message from the lady who suggested I must have real problems with my masculinity if I needed to buy a truck bigger than most bass boats to assert it.
No, madam, the maroon, 1967 Firebird 400 convertible with a 411 rear-end gear ratio, Positraction and racing slicks was an assertion of my masculinity. But I was only 17 then, and my masculinity needed all the validation and assertion it could get, since I wasn’t on the football team (being a writer for the school newspaper didn’t cut it in the romance department). Bottom line, that rocket of a car helped me get dates. If I had only had a cute dog to ride around with me in the front seat while I cruised the A&W, I would have been absolute catnip to girls.
Happily, there were also several messages from men and women after my own heart. They counseled me not to sell the pickup that I love so much, but to hold on to it. Drive a little less while gas is so expensive, they said, but those prices will eventually go down, and then all will be right with the cosmos once again. You’ll still have your beloved Ford 150, and you won’t be driving an automobile so wimpy you have to wear a paper bag on your head with little eyeholes cut out so the neighbors won’t be able to identify you in that total embarrassment of a car.
I took their advice and kept my pickup, and now I’m glad I did, because those folks turned out to be prescient.
Between the time I wrote that column and yesterday, oil prices had dropped to a 14- month low, due to decreased demand from people like me who are driving less. Those prices, which were around $147 a barrel in July, were about $70 a barrel on Oct. 17, a 50 percent slide.
Those prices are expected to drop even more. Most analysts figure it will stabilize at around $50 a barrel, but one guy I saw on television said it could go as low as $30.
Prices are dropping so fast that the free-fall prompted the members of OPEC to call an emergency meeting to discuss cutting production. They’re so used to gouging their customers, they’ll do everything in their power to keep the touted “market economy” from cutting into the revenue they need to run their yachts and jumbo jets.
“We gotta do something fast,” one of them probably said. “Mama needs new jewels.”
Who knows if they’ll succeed in keeping oil prices artificially high, but for the time being, with gas at around three bucks a gallon and expected to drop below that mark next week, I can afford to drive my pickup again, if sparingly.
I have noticed one thing that I don’t quite understand, however. Back in the spring when gas prices were rising faster than Joe Biden when he sees a microphone, the guy with the hardest job in town was the fellow who had to change the price per gallon sign at the service station. That guy was running his legs off.
And remember when hurricane season was in full bore, and oil companies were raising their prices in “anticipation” of potentially reduced production at Texas and other Gulf Coast refineries? The oil companies, coming off their most profitable year and quarter ever, solemnly explained that even though the gas they had in their storage tanks might have been worth $3.50 or more per gallon, they had to raise prices so they’d have a cushion if things went to heck in a handcart.
These days, you sure don’t see them lowering their prices in “anticipation” of oil dropping to $40 or even $30 a barrel, which we last saw in the early 1980s.
Nope, you don’t see that, ever. I heard one oil executive recently opine that they’d probably have to raise prices so they’ll have a cushion if things go to heck in a handcart.
Got to keep those Exxon Mobil shareholders happy, after all. Can’t have them traveling in the same wagon as many of the rest of us, who have seen the value of our 401k accounts drop by as much as 20 percent in recent weeks on account of the collapse of the housing, banking and stock markets.
As Vizzini told Inigo Montoya in one of the greatest movies of all time, “The Princess Bride,” “As I told you, that would be absolutely, totally and in all other ways inconceivable.”
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Speaking of inconceivable, I understand that Mr. James Wasser (he of the bogus doctorate) is still hanging on as superintendent of the Freehold Regional High School District.
Once people figured out that he had received his Ph.D. from a diploma mill, the calls for his resignation reached a near crescendo, and one professional indignity was heaped on the next. Still, he has so far refused to do the right thing and quit his job, so the school board can give it to someone who is more qualified and less damaged.
Here’s my question, Mr. Wasser. How can we miss you when you won’t go away?
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A sign spotted recently at the door of the Freehold post office and sent to me by an alert reader: FREEHOLT POST OFFICE.
No comment necessary.
Gregory Bean is executive editor of Greater Media Newspapers. You can reach him at [email protected].