GAS!?

The price for gasoline is raising every second these days. According to the announcement of The Oil Information Center last week, the average gas price (nationwide, Aug 7, 2006) was 143.7 yen/liter. It says that the record has been broken for the first time in sixteen years since they started the research in 1987.

Like I mentioned in Monday’s entry, the season is summer and everybody’s on vacation with cars and planes for long distance moving. It’s probably the time of year when we need most gas. Even if it wasn’t for obon or for the oil anxiety gas prices go up up up during vacation seasons and torture our pocketbooks. It’s even said that it could lead to the shrinking of the gas market.

I heard this is because the oil distributors took in this new price setting system of clap on transportation fee and personnel costs on top of the rising oil price. Well, good for you guys. Take super unfair advantage, right.

By the way for your information, the highest price until now was 142 yen per liter back in November 1990 right before the Gulf War erupted. This was more due to the reason of oil crisis so it was proper to some extent, I guess, but this time there is way too much calculation to it. Usually what the distributors do in situations like this is to try to keep the price down as low as possible even though the surplus could be smaller, so that more people would still want to get gas and would hopefully lead to enlargement of oil sales. The price rising this time is unusually unusual... can you believe that it has risen for 14.9 yen per liter (11.6%) in only seven months?
I dear hope that this tendency stays only in the gas market, but I do kind of doubt it for obvious reasons...