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> It's just an odd choice on a page that's only about USA fuel prices

I don't see why. There is a global fuel crisis. It is affecting prices in much of the world. This particular page is about those prices in the US. The page's title, "Tracking Costco Gas Prices During a Global Fuel Crisis", describes exactly and accurately what it is doing.

26% increase on something that is priced into the price of everything else is huge. In comparison the RAM price surge is a big deal in the consumer market but not nearly as bad as the chip shortages a few years back for industrial use. Fuel consumption is not really elastic either. Most people don't really need a new PC, but if you can't afford gas you will end up jobless real quick.

It can also get a lot worse very quickly when countries' strategic reserves run dry.

Sounds like you're the one making this political.

I don't know if this is how Costco itself thinks of it, but you can get to a pretty decent understanding of their financials by assuming they sell everything at cost and pocket the membership fees as profit. Their actual profits tend to be about 50% higher than that implies, but given the size of the rest of the business that means the membership fees are only about 2% of the revenue overall it's not a bad approximation.

They can twiddle with dropping a bit of price here and raising it somewhere else and still have the same ratio of cost.

Of course you can still think of things in terms of the cost per item versus the profit per item, but the stability of that ratio over many years makes me wonder if maybe Costco thinks of the membership fees that way.

Weird. Costco is never the cheapest price for Coke in my area. Or the previous state I lived in. At least if you bought during sales at competing Supermarkets.

Where they win my Diet Coke business is that they are consistently a "good deal" - never the cheapest, but never the most expensive. And I don't need to wait for a sale to stock up.

I still buy soda from the local grocery stores when I happen by a deal when shopping for other things. But I don't go out of my way. The specials are usually much better than Costco though. By 25% or more per can.

Honestly this goes for most things I buy at Costco. Even in bulk, their per-unit costs beat the standard pricing at competitors - but never the sale prices. It just removes mental overhead. And the bulk prices are always better at a restaurant supply store. Where Costco wins in this area is curation so I can reduce mental load, but then again Costco does the bullshit where they stock something for 6mo out of the year and you spend an extra 20 minutes searching the store for it the next time you need it only realizing they stopped selling it. Then it appears randomly a month later.

They are a decent middle ground for me. I can buy 10lbs of chicken breast of decent quality for $2.99/lb I can toss directly into the freezer pre-packaged into meal-sized portions. Or I can buy 40lb boxes of bulk chicken breast for $1.39/lb from the supply store and spend a couple hours vacuum packaging it myself.

I definitely have a love/hate relationship with the place! I see Costco as the upper middle class consumerism version of nerd sniping.

In rural America, getting someone into the parking lot isn’t much different than in the front door when the next box store is 10-20+ minutes away.

It makes less sense in the suburbs.

The average Costco ticket is $150 out the door. The retail margin is 11%, or $16.50.

Say you fill the car with 15 gallons, and they lose $0.25/gallon. That’s $3.75. If 1/3 of the gas station customers go in the store, they’re making $5.50 from retail, less the gas losses they net $1.75.

They make money, deny their competition business, and lock you mentally into saving money on gas and renewing that membership. That membership is half their operating income.

I’m probably being pessimistic. One thing with Costco is they are incredibly efficient, so I’m sure they’ve baked out cost and overhead. You can see stuff like how they provide the minimum number of garbage cans.

It really doesn't sound good. A loss leader is meant to get you into the store; the gas station is usually far away, in the back of the parking lot.

Their $5 chicken now, that's a great "loss leader" (if it even is; that isn't confirmed). Because that forces you not just into the store, but all the way to the back. So you go in for the $5 chicken and leave with $20 of blueberries, $20 of cereal $20 of milk $20 of mayo.

Same thing with hotdog combo at $1.50. The price hasn't changed in 40+ years.

Here's a good article: https://www.inc.com/bill-murphy-jr/how-costco-turns-loss-lea...

This is mostly wrong, sorry. Big chains absolutely do sign national or huge regional supply agreements for gasoline, e.g. Pilot/Flying J, Buc-ee’s, Sheetz, Costco, Sam’s Club, Speedway, etc.

You have two main errors: 1) conflating refineries with terminals 2) forgetting that fuel is a fungible financial product.

There are terminals all over the country, within trucking distance of the stations they serve. Those terminals can be supplied by a nearby refinery, yes, but also one or more distant refineries connected to a pipeline or via ship, train, or barge. There is an entire swath of the energy market called "midstream" that handles this.

Once a refined fuel gets into a terminal, its refinery of origin stops really mattering for contract purposes because of swaps. Exxon can supply gasoline in one market while Marathon supplies an economically equivalent amount somewhere else. Nobody is moving “Exxon molecules”. I mean, it literally all goes into the same tank if it's the same product. They (the terminal) just keep track of who supplied how much. The detergent package is also mixed in at the terminal loading rack, along with ethanol in the case of gas, not at the refinery.

Also, very few states actually have specific rules. California is the only real pain in the butt. You might be thinking of summer vs. winter blends, where the refiners adjust the vapor pressure to reduce emission in the summer and to increase ease of engine starting in the winter. This is something every refinery can and easily does.

Do we know how Costco's "additive package" rates relative to other providers (e.g., Shell's) additive packages?

Currently I buy Shell gas b/c I trust that it's good for my car's engine. Can I trust that Costco's gas is as good as Shell's?

weird fact. there's no refineries in florida. All the gasoline in south florida comes in via ship/barge.

Costco isnt losing $10. They can sell gas at cost to run a gas station if they want to. They break even and get people there instead of a normal gas station.

Sadly 2 parts of Arizona use CA gas.

This means a couple of things: those places don't have 93, and the mileage you get out of a gallon is less.

I wish the government would ban 2 stroke engines (like leaf-blowers), which would have a much larger effect on air quality, vs using CA's oxygenated gas.

Every state has their own gas. Well, you might find the same gas in, say, North Dakota and Minnesota or something, but those are right next to each other and have very similar environment situations. On the other hand, I wouldn't be surprised if Minneapolis, and western Minnesota had different rules for environmental reasons.

People are incredibly irrational about gas prices and have been since I've been alive.

I remember listening to AM talk radio back in the late 90's and a common trope was you'd get someone calling in ranting about gas prices and how they couldn't afford to take their kid on vacation due to current $president in the white house.

Even back in my early teens I'd pencil out the math and it'd be like a $20 price difference for 6 tanks of gas on their 800 mile round trip with the worst fuel efficiency you could imagine. I thought then - as I do now - that if $20 made a difference in you taking a vacation or not you couldn't afford it to begin with.

For most folks it's just an easy topic for people to rant about.

In my travels, the delta is often much greater than ~15 cents. Today is an unusually-consistent day in this market area.

I'd love say that keeping an eye on gas prices and trying to time the market to buy on the right day are things that make poor use of my time. That sounds very nice.

I don't have the financial means to turn a blind eye to these kinds of costs, though. Things are rough over here.

What is more important that those $75 is whether or not the gas offered at the other station is Top Tier grade. Costco always is as far as I can tell. (I am not affiliated with Costco in any way shape or form)

Oh, I'm happy to do my shopping there. Just not gas and tires.

Doesn’t matter at all for my local Costco. It’s busy open to close with very little variance.

The only times I’ve seen it relatively empty were during bad storms.

That said, it’s not an hour wait. Around 20 minutes is average, but I rarely fill up there since I value my time much more than that.