Generally it's the board of directors, but if it has a very large impact on the company the shareholders may vote over it. The current shareholders usually has the right to purchase the new shares if they want to. The board of directors is elected by the shareholders. Sorry, but there's no great conspiracy here.

Care to offer an alternative?

Nice try, but you forgot Oil Futures. Just a sec, I will post the link to the overlay. Between Gas and Futures.

Alright, let just prove it with a few days.

Prices have dropped in the futures market, but prices will continue to go up at the pump for about another 20 days, before they start to fall again.

It is the TTM, that you can take advantage of.


As for the other, dude, businesses run like that for a long time. And once a competitor is run out, there are barriers for re-entry. Especially for independents. They just saw what happen to the previous guy. If you don't come with moola, your toast.



The whole point is that you can take advantage of the TTM in the Gasoline.  There is a corelation between Futures, Spot, TTM, and local gas prices.

Of course you only do it when you see the Futures going up, not down. But the lag in TTM is enough to solidify your position.

Ok, this shouldn't come as a surprise to many. But if one is in a better position, financially, you can run your competition out of business by taking a loss over time. It is done all the time. Without collusion, it is simplistic and effective. Once you run out the competition you recoup your losses. By agreeing to minimums, they try to prevent this from happening.

With collusion, it can be devastating.

Station A subsidizes Station B to undercut Station C.  Station C being independent, can't compete. When Station C goes out of business, Station B reimburses Station A.

Good find, that is what they do.

It is still illegal for them to get together and determine minimum prices. BP, Exxon, Shell, etc.. can't together determine the minimum price for their franchisees.  But that doesn't stop them.  Technically the one producing more should have a lessor price but they don't.

What they do is sort of follow the law. They can't ask each other what their minimums are, but if they overhear it by a non-executive, or get it from a survey, that is perfectly legal.  Guess what gets surveyed every day at almost every gas station in America. Yep the price of Gas and they share that survey with everyone. But that isn't the real problem, the real problem is the agreed upon mark ups for stations.

Which between stations is almost identical.  Exxon-Mobile should let their franchisee's have a bigger mark up but they don't. By adding the NDA to the agreements they even keep stations from confirming.

So every once in a while there will be a Conference where industry professionals will "over hear" the others mark-up agreements. Technically perfectly legal, and very hard to prove collusion.

For going the individual method.

I will give you a for example:

In the U.S.:

If a gas station fills his underground tank with 10,000 gallons of gas that he bought at $1 a gallon.

Now assume he sells no gas for a month.

Then Gas goes up to $2 a gallon from his supplier.

The Gas that he has in his tank that he bought at $1 a gallon, can not be sold at the $2 price point.

He will have to sell his gas at the $1 rate plus agreed upon mark up until he sells 10,000 gallons. Then he can raise prices. There is an averaging that is allowed, if he receives a delivery before he sells the 10,000 gallons. This is kind of allowing the mixing of fiduciary funds in an insurance account. Most avoid it in case someone complains of gouging.

You can usually see this in work if your town has a lot of gas stations, especially recently with big changes happening fast.

You should have seen one station with several cents difference, some high, some low.  Why does this happen? If it worked as you said, the prices among stations should always be close to each other.

Investors don't need to consent.  Corporations issue new shares by right, because they are corporate 'persons' and they own themselves.  Issuing shares confers no legal rights of ownership.  It is just meaningless claptrap designed to defraud suckers.  It is like fiat money -- a unit of exchange backed by nothing whatsoever that can be created at will.

Of course, thanks to the illustrious dipshits in the US Justice Dept., you can't do anything like printing your own money.  But corporations sure can.  So in the modern US, immortal, psychopathic legal fictions have more rights than actual humans.

Franchised stations can not by contract under sell it, they are also told what their profit will be from the gas by restricting the maximum price. Do they have to listen? No, but then they don't get to buy it from their supplier and don't get any "support" from them either, and must remove the name.

Individuals, however, you and me. Have no such contracts. We can buy it and do what we wish. And I really don't care about the conspiracy, because as individuals we can bypass the process. We limit our profitability by not being a "business",  but we can maximize our margins. If enough individuals did this, "they" would be force to change.

I look at the futures and the spot price, correlate the TTM (time to market) and suck out the difference.  Gas is one of the few commodities that this can be done with on a individual basis because of access to the end product is abundant and easy  to acquire and re-sell. Technically you could do it with others like corn but it would be much harder because of all the factors (weather, disease, shelf life,  TTM is to long, etc...) And people don't have to buy Corn, but they do have to buy Gas, at least for now.

Wal-Mart is in its own category, but they aren't doing it at a loss, just a discount. Big Companies, actually own wells. I developed a field for a company called IP, now I wrongly assumed it was something like International Petroleum or something like that. But it actually turned out to be, International Paper. They bought the lease to offset the cost of fuel. That is just International Paper.

Wal-Mart is big enough to not even to have to buy a well, they can hedge like no tomorrow, just like Airlines.

I like them though, they are truly competing. But look at what it takes to do it. Be the biggest company in America, with enough power to not be pushed around.

And it works, the lines at Sam's are huge with just 5¢ discount. I just want independents to be able to do what Wal-Mart can by eliminating some clauses in Franchise contracts. That anyone who knows about them, can't talk about them. They built in the NDA.

I added emphasis. Investors may have consented to a company printing new shares when they bought its stock. That doesn't mean that it won't harm them if it does so.

Isn't a company typically a current owner? Does it not have the authority to sell the new shares created after a split?

Ok, I will just take my town. The $1 example was extreme just to make the point. In reality just a 5¢ difference would work, a 10¢ difference would be fantastic. Lets say a Convenient store sells 1000 gallons a day at a 1.10 / gallon. The average they get to keep is 7¢ per gallon. So they take in $1100 dollars and get to keep $77 dollars for the mark up. Remember Gas is the lowest mark up at any gas station. The average mark up is at minimum 100% for retail merchandise. So just by selling a few extra candy bars will quickly make up for the Gas.

Lets say they sell 100 candy bars at 1$ at the 1.10 gas price. They make $50 dollars profit off of the Candy Bars alone. Now if they sold the gas at a loss at $1, they have a net loss of 3¢. They give up the 7¢ mark up and take a loss of 3¢.

Now because of their lower prices, their gas sales go up to say $2000 dollars a day at a loss of $60 per day.  So they need to make up at least $60 dollars to break even.

Now traffic doubled, it stands that their in store purchases doubled. But the prices in the store have at least a 100% mark up. But anyone that shops at a convenient store know the mark up is higher than that.

Let me ask, do you thing the store will make more money by taking a 3¢ per gallon hit on the gas and taking a 50% increase on their other items that are marked up at least 100%.

But it gets better, if they make money on that model, and they invest the increase into an interest bearing account on a percentage basis to further subsidize the fuel. It would be funny to buy 10 year T-Notes at 4%, and use the Government to help. (kind of a Gotchya). They will have a model of being able to out compete competitors and put downward pressure on price of others.

Not on a grand Oil Industry Model, but on a Individual Basis with in the Oil Industry Model. So how does the Oil Industry prevent this from happening. Well with Contracts, and Laws that they have lobbied for.  Or like other industries, just buy them out. Actually in other industries their is a model to compete to get bought out. Especially in the electronics industry and internet. Buy your competitors before they can harm your bottom line.

But certain industries have prevented the competition to avoid it.  Banking, Oil, etc...

But as an individual, we can bypass all those things. If many do it on a small scale, they can't stop it.

If only with 20 Gallon gas containers.

That's awful. I always thought that companies would just split their stock if they needed more units.

That is the genius behind their system. They lock in the profits to them by preventing others from raising and in some cases lowering the price.

For example, there are truck stops that should have very low gas prices, because they can take profits from their other businesses in the truck stop and self subsidize the gas price to get greater traffic. ( The Casino Model - most loose money on food and beverage but make it up in increased traffic due to the Great Food and prices )

Show me one example of this in the United States, and I will concede to you.  Imagine: a truck stop that could self subsidizes the Gas buy a $1 a gallon. They would make a fortune on Mechanical Services, Restaurant Services, Parts, Gadgets, etc.... because of the increase traffic. The margins on the other sales greatly out weigh the margins on Gas.  So why isn't this occurring?  Because they are not allowed to do it.

The Casino Business Model in just one Gas Franchise would become the number one gas station in the U.S.

Me too, You think there is no such thing as collusion, in economic models through use of the Government, Laws, and Competitive communication.

Are you a Keynesian? 

Examine that, you must buy it. There is little competition. You can easily charge a lot more for it.

When supply is low and demand high, the price should go up.  So at the most remote gas station, the price should be high. We know the demand is there, if there are not a lot of others selling the same product, the price should be high.  But why isn't it?  I have been trying to tell you.

How about this one, in Lake Charles, LA ( the whole town is a Refinery), there is a Circle K gas station sitting in the middle of the refinery right next to the interstate. Supply and Demand should dictate that it should be the lowest.  Nope, one of highest prices in the whole state.

Now, you don't have to go to far to show, "conspiracies" in Louisiana.  Other than Alaska, it should have the lowest gas prices. Alaska has high gas prices too but they pay their citizens royalties of around $2000 a year to offset the prices. Imagine that, you make money just for being a citizen in Alaska.

But if you have asked around at your gas stations, (managers), you will start to see the picture. Prices are dictated to them. When it comes to gas, it is not truly a supply/demand model.

http://maps.google.com/maps?q=gasoline near 45.45955%2C-101.91356

This is the farthest point from a McDonalds in the US, and all of the gas stations nearby.  But it won't tell you much since prices are determined by supply and demand, and the supply in sparsely-populated areas is usually higher than the supply in big cities.

Yes, I do.  Your right, go along with it. Keep the bubble intact.

I am just Delusional,     I do like playing chess however. There is no price fixing by mandatory mark ups of 7-11 cents. It just doesn't exist.

Tell you what, go find the most remote gas station in America, call it for its Gas Prices. It should be the most expensive gas in the country. You can subtract all the taxes from everywhere to get the baseline. 

BTW: the biggest reason in differences in prices it the TAXES, the FED, State, and Localities charge.

IF the most remotest gas station in America has the highest or even a high gas price, I will concede.  But it won't.

It's to allow for high latency between nodes. If it was one minute, a few seconds of latency between ends of the network could give someone with good network resources a better chance of winning blocks, damaging the "one vote per CPU" principle.

Also, remember that a confirmation is valuable because it represents some CPU power. If it took a minute on average to get a confirmation, you'd have to get 10 confirmations to match the protection of a single 10-minute confirmation. 1-minute confirmations might even be less valuable than 0 confirmations in such a system because it could be cheaper for an attacker to solve the required number of blocks than to overcome the TCP network.