Think you’re saving money buying gas in a bigger SLO County town? Maybe not.
During the past couple of years, I dreamed wistfully about a time when our conversations didn’t begin and end with the pandemic.
What we have now was so not what I was wishing for.
Who’d have thought that $7 a gallon gasoline would the happier of our two primary dinner-table topics these days? (For emotional stability and digestion, I can’t handle war discussions when I’m eating.)
These days, if we find a station with regular for under six bucks a gallon? Yeah, it feels like Christmas.
With this county’s gasoline prices among the highest in the U.S. now, how often lately have you logged into GasBuddy or Waze to find the cheapest fuel where you are or are going?
Finding cheap gas not a game anymore
When I was a child, it was almost a game and a challenge for my mom to find the least expensive ground beef and gasoline in town, driving from store to store, gas station to gas station and feeling like a champ when she scored a 2- or 3-cent drop per pound or gallon.
Price hopping’s just not a fiscally responsible option these days, and the margins are exponentially bigger.
A friend was pumping diesel on March 3, at the now long-gone diesel price of $5.39 a gallon. Then someone else pulled in on the other side of the pump. As my pal watched, she was wide-eyed when the price on the station’s roadside sign soared 50 cents per gallon in the blink of an eye.
The other driver paid $5.89 a gallon.
My friend Claudia Alexander described the situation perfectly when she shared a March 10 Facebook posting: “Pretty excited! Our loan was approved. We’re closing on a full tank of gasoline this weekend.”
Yup. With the ongoing war in Ukraine and soaring inflation, your bank account’s sticker shock is going to be like a Magnitude 8.whatever financial earthquake. Not to mention in your 401K.
High gas prices impact everyone
Of course, the budget-busting gas costs that will drastically affect our lives aren’t just for our own vehicles.
It’s for the trucks that deliver things to the stores we shop in.
The planes, ships and trains that deliver things to the trucks.
Police cars, ambulances and fire engines.
The aircraft that are so crucial to dowsing wildfires.
On and on and on, like a fiscal vacuum sucking the life out of our wallets.
As another blow to our popular SLO County coastal area, tourism could tank again — whether or not Hearst Castle finally reopens within the next few weeks or so. Remember how steeply the visitation averages dropped after 9-11 and at the start of the pandemic?
Lots of RVs that people bought as their escape hatches during the pandemic could be going up for sale — cheap — soon.
Would you want to fill up the tank in a mondo vehicle that might, just might, get 10 mpg on the highway, going downhill, just so you can take a spur-of-the-moment day trip or weekend to Big Sur?
Is buying gas close to home better?
But back at our own gas tanks: Sure, I could save some bucks on fuel by taking a beautiful drive and pulling up to a pump in one of the bigger towns south of us.
Unless I have to go in that direction anyway, say for work, school, a doctor’s appointment, to pick someone up at the airport, or to do essential shopping — that presumed cost-saving trek may not be worth it.
To prove it to myself (and a resident son who loves to drive), I did the mileage math, even though y’all know how much I hate math and it hates me.
Here are my calculations for the Tanner household, as I calculated them in early March. Obviously, they’ve changed since then, and likely will continue to do so. Gas prices, thy name is not stability.
Google Maps tells me a round trip from Cambria to Morro Bay is 42 miles.
That means (I think), at 17 mpg, I’d use 2.47 gallons of gas to get there and back. At $5 a gallon, the trip would set me back about $12.35 for the round trip, not allowing for side trips to Montana de Oro, Carlock’s Bakery in Los Osos or even some in-city driving around for the heck of it or for fish and chips and otter watching.
The same math ratios show that, at $6 or $7 a gallon, respectively, the cost to drive round trip to Morro Bay leaps to about $14.80 and $17.30.
Gleep.
Our other usual go-to spots in the county? The 60-mile round trip to Paso Robles costs about $17.60, $21.20 and $24.70 at $5, $6 and $7 a gallon, respectively, for a 17 mpg vehicle.
San Luis Obispo? $20, $24 and $28. For each 68-mile round trip.
So, if I buy 12 gallons of gas in Cambria at $7 a gallon that costs $84 (which is a heart attack waiting to happen), and Morro Bay’s gas is $5 ($60), I could save $14.
But it would cost me at least $12 for the fuel to get there. Not much savings, is it?
And the kicker for son Brian? Mom’s new math proves it doesn’t cost that much more for him to fill up the Toyota at the Cambria station owned by one of his golfing buds.
Drive out of town for work?
Sure, unless I’ve got a business or medical appointment, I can probably talk myself out of going out of town.
But what about commuters?
If you drive out of town for work, the inflation punch is especially horrific.
Say you live in Cambria and work someplace else. At 17 mpg and $5 a gallon, that’ll set you back about $62 a week to Morro Bay, $88 to Paso and $100 to SLO.
If you’re making $15 an hour, 40 hours a week, that’s a gross pay of $600 a week. Taking out, say, $60-$100 for taxes and other deductions, leaves $500-$540 net a week.
That means you’d be paying around one-fifth of your take-home wages for the gas to commute.
And at the higher cost per gallon? My brain’s worn out, so you do the math.
The SLORTA bus begins to look pretty good, doesn’t it, assuming the route goes anywhere close to where you need to be, when you need to be there.
I guess there’s no time like the present to adopt the wise philosophy of our fave movie heroine, Dorothy Gale of Kansas.
“There’s no place like home.”
For now, Oz and the Emerald City may have to wait.
This story was originally published March 15, 2022 at 5:00 AM.
