Octane envy

Okay, enough with the niceties. We begin our week with a tiny bit of paranoia offered by G of San Diego, who was trolling back in old Bing Blogs (get a life, dude!) and found something additional in what we might learn from the current crisis (as I saw it last August, when things were so much merrier, and we weren’t all sitting around waiting for the final quarter-point cut from BenCo).

It has to do with gas prices. This past weekend, I was in the Bay Area near San Francisco, and Regular was going for around $4.00 a gallon. I saw Premium for as high as $4.29.  Amazing sight to somebody who once used to get Merit for 23-cents a gallon — and I’m young, I tell you. Young!

As always, the gas is higher in affluent areas, which might make a person cynical if they didn’t believe in the fairness and probity of fuel companies and the Feds who oversee their evergreen efforts. They tell me that gas prices are still low in Texas, so that’s something.

At least, one would hope, you get your $4.29-worth when you sidle up to the fuel dispenser.  But this note from G  suggests otherwise. I don’t know about the accuracy and fairness of his or her research (there is no discernible gender to the letter G), but it seems worth passing along…

“The Gasoline Octane and how they are ripping off consumers per-gallon, and they can’t even see it happening to them,” G writes, searching for a subject and verb. He continues…

“As a consumer you should be aware of the following when purchasing a “Octane price” of gasoline in San Diego, CA.

Note
92- $4.12 /gallon
87- $4.09/gallon
84- $3.50/gallon

However, after filling three test gas bottles with different octanes of gasoline – 92, 89 and 84 – and after testing each octane with a octane tester, we found that most of the octanes of each gasoline were marked with the wrong octane of the gasoline, [which] was found to only to have a 87 Octane reading gasoline at some gas stations.

Most of these readings were tested more than three times…

What we have found… we paid $4.12 for something that was only worth the price of 84 octane fuel, which should of been only $3.50. In truth it showed a loss of 62 cent per gallon. As for the loss of a 20 gallon fill up, I lost a whopping $12.40.

Now I am thinking of hiring some consumer affairs attorneys to file a lawsuit on three gasoline companies for my losses since the the gas crisis started. Any Ideas of any attorneys that want to go up against three major gasoline companies?

I am happy to say that I know no such attorneys. I am, however, interested in the topic as a consumer.

Is this an urban legend? Could some small part of it be true? Is it a local gas-station issue, or something being foisted upon us as a gigantic corporate trend? Or is little G giving the big G gas companies a bum rap?

Anybody out there have a clue? If so, pump it up the pipeline, will ya?