Window Shopper

Going to the pump these days is bad enough, don’t you think? I have not heard of one person who is happy with the current gas prices. The greedy oil companies keep on pumping it out to us like we do not matter to them at all. And you cannot get them to even acknowledge that they are ripping us off. Congress does nothing about it. And NOW there is one more ripoff. Credit cards at the pump. HELP!

Have you been watching your receipts when you buy gas with a credit card? If not, you should. The credit card companies love to tack on a fee for use at the pump which they do…..but wait, it gets better..or worse….Now the gas stations are tacking on a fee for using the card. The price can be a lot higher than if you pay cash. WHAT? Yep. The price can be as high as *9* cents more, sometimes more than that. That was as high as I had seen it on the news today.

EDIT NOTE: As awful as the 9 cents might have sounded, it’s not compared to the 50 cents a gallon that some stations are charging simply for using a credit card instead of cash. If a person uses cash, they have to go inside where they can get ripped off by the prices of the goods in the store. There is no win here unless the person buys the gas with cash and refuses to buy anything else in the store.

It seems that the local gas station wants you to come inside to pay because if you don’t, you do not also buy other things. They have been losing money with the plastic. So, if you don’t pay with cash coming inside to do that, you can count on paying more at the pump. It’s sort of a penalty for having a credit card.

I call that a ripoff. It forces the customer to do things they did not want to do. On a purely physical note, if you need the exercise, go ahead and walk inside. Might do you some good. However, if you are just mad because they are making you do things you had no intention of doing, perhaps finding a new gas station to buy from might be in order. I do not believe that they all do this. But it looks like they do this in the bigger cities for certain.

We live in a rural area where we use a gas card from a well known retailer. We get a discount. But my husband watches to make certain we get that discount every time. If we don’t, the pump does not go on and he goes inside to find out why. In these times, you have to watch your every dollar going out. If you don’t, all of a sudden you are broke and it isn’t anywhere near the next paycheck time. We should know.

Ordinarily at this point, I would be wanting to tell you about places to go, things to see for vacations. This year, I cannot think how to do that because of the astronomically high gas prices which, shockingly, have reached a national average of $4 a gallon according to AAA. And of course, it is conveniently at just the time that most Americans are wanting to travel on their family summer vacations.

I think it is an absolute shame that the oil companies, who are increasingly greedy and self interested, are causing the American public to change their whole lifestyles to serve the CEOs and companies so that their pockets can be lined with bucks from those of us who can ill afford to even pull up to the pumps these days. I don’t know about you but in our house, we cannot afford more than a couple of tanks of gas a month even in our rural area. The price at the pump here is somewhat lower at the current rate of $3.89 which is horrifying to us but much lower than other areas of the country.

At our house, we could not afford the gas prices over the $3 mark let alone $4. We, like so many Americans, live on a fixed or semi-fixed income. We unashamedly find ways to have an income but are constantly stopped by other just as greedy companies that think they can run our lives. The oil companies make us pay extremely high prices at the pump while the internet company, Google, chooses to slap us down when we do the horrendous thing of blogging for money online if we do not do it Google’s way.

Through it all, these money grabbing companies are going to not only bring the American public to it’s knees, it is going to bring down the whole country as they are currently doing. What is it going to take to change all this? I have no idea. Wish I had a magic bullet to fix it all but I do not. My only advice, as crappy as it may sound, is to stay home this vacation…not going to the pumps at all. Let the greed of the oil companies have their day by not having the sales they expect to have. The problem is that all people do not go on vacation at once. So it will hardly be seen at the pump unless we all agree to boycott the pumps for a few days. Yeah, like that’s going to happen.

As for Google, that greedy company online that does not want others to share in the wealth of the net, we are choosing to blog for pay anyway. Some of the blog for pay companies are getting the idea of not basing their criteria on the page rank that Google shows those of us who do blog for pay. That is a step forward and I certainly hope that Google falls on it’s nasty little internet tail bone. It AND the oil companies as well as the oil people in the middle east deserve everything they get when they do fall on their posteriors. I just hope we can enjoy that instead of standing in a food line somewhere. Sigh.

I do not have to tell you this. You already know the pain that is going on at the pumps. The problem is that we could have a few solutions but the congress will not deal with this like the American public needs. They seem to have stopped doing anything about this. Maybe I am wrong about that. But the last thing I heard was when the senators were a bit indignant that the CEOs wanted more tax breaks after having posted record profits last year. Unbelievable that they had the gall to want that.

One of the solutions to this problem is more economical cars. Want a laugh? As I started driving some years ago….ah hem…many years ago, the cars then were getting somewhere between 25-35 miles to the gallon. We had heard of test cars that were getting above 45 miles to the gallon. Yep. Then somewhere along the line, and here I would check out 1972 when the lines at the gas station were huge, they stopped trying for economy.

Lately, the car companies are seeing that big oil is turning against them (who would have seen that coming? Anyone with a brain) so they are scrambling to get more gallons per mile out of those new cars. The wonder is that they are thinking that 30 miles to the gallon is great. Uh no!!! All we need to do is go back to the older cars that get more mpg than today’s cars and we have it made. Well, see there’s the rub.

What’s the problem? When those cars were getting that great gas mileage, they were using actual gasoline. I know the difference. You could smell good gasoline at the pump. It had a distinct smell. Now, the gas smells funny and not good funny. They have changed the gas of today so much so that it took out most of the good fuel economy away.

And lets talk about using up our food to put in our tanks. Doesn’t anyone see a problem here???? We are not planting enough food to get us by for the rest of the year as a country. Yet, we are growing a vast majority of food plants to refine into fuel. Does NO ONE SEE????? What kind of stupid does it take to make this the solution to the problem? We are sacrificing our food for fuel!! COME ON!!! Get a clue, someone!!!

For the record, I have no intentions in using ethanol unless and until there is no other way. I refuse to be part of the massive stupidity that has come out of this so-called solution. NO, NO, NO!!! Someone please get a grip on reality here. If we use up our resources to make fuel, we don’t eat, our kids don’t eat, massive famine. What happens then? We start looking like a third world country. Hey, I do know we could get our belts tighter because most of us need to lose some weight anyway but not at the sacrifice of our children. Someone PLEASE think!!!! Stop the insanity!!!