It's That Time Of Year Again

I went to Lowe's with Mimi 3 days before Halloween.  There were three or four rows plus the main area at the front of the store full of Christmas decorations. There was a very small area of Thanksgiving decorations on clearance. Something is wrong with this picture. Just saying.

New Content in The Toy Box

For those interested in my consumer opinions...A Tale of Two Tire Purchases.

Serious Gas

As promised recently, it’s time that I get back to posting thought provoking content that doesn’t involve guns or M&M. One of the easiest of topics falling into the thought provoking categories is gasoline prices. This is a topic near and dear to my heart being the moron who bought his lovely and deserving wife a gas snorting behemoth SUV. So much for that extra salary money that came with the new job.

Sitting here typing this, I can look out my office window and see a gas station sign proclaiming that they will sell me a gallon of gas for the low, low price of $3.57 a gallon. Being the numbers geek that I am, I have a spreadsheet where I tracked gas prices (for budgeting purposes) over the last five or six years when I was commuting regularly. The lowest I’ve paid in that time frame was $1.45 per gallon at the end of 2008 and early in 2009. The most I paid was $3.94 a gallon in June of 2008.

So, what has the biggest impact on the cost of that gallon of gas you ask? Simply put, it is the cost of the barrel of oil from which the gas is refined. As of today, West Texas Intermediate crude oil is trading at $107.42 per barrel. There are 42 gallons in a barrel by the way, and I am also ignoring the price differences in the various grades of oil. It is my layperson’s understanding that a gallon of oil can be refined into approximately a gallon of gas with some other by products. So, for the purposes of this exercise, we will assume that there is a one to one oil to gas ratio. If that assumption is correct, a barrel of oil costing $100 translates into $2.38 towards the cost of that gallon of gas at the pump.

That’s just the cost of getting the oil out of the ground. You still have to transport the oil to the refinery, refine it, transport it to a retail location, market it, and pay your friendly, neighborhood gas station owner (not all or probably even a majority of stations are corporately owned). Oh, and let’s not forget the state and federal fingers in this pie.

The exact cost of refining is hard to pin down in a quick Google search, but one website I came across suggested that it accounts for 14% of the cost of a gallon of gas. This percentage fluctuates somewhat depending on refining capacity. You can pump all the oil in the world, and it won’t make much of a dent in the price of gas if there is no capacity to refine it. Supply and demand not only applies to the commodity itself but to the manufacturing process as well. Next time you want to get your blood boiling, take a look at when the last time it was that a new refinery was built in the United States. If I am not mistaken, it was 1976 (although one report indicates that a small refinery was built in Alaska in 1993). Environmentalists and government regulation have seen to it that new refineries don’t get built forcing companies to expand and refit existing refineries which hampers capacity quite a bit.

While we are on the subject of the government, you can thank them for another 13% or so (depending on where you live) towards the cost of your gallon of gas. The federal gas tax is 18.4 cents per gallon. State gas taxes vary from a low in Alaska of 8 cents a gallon to a high of 49.6 cents in Connecticut. Texas, where I live, falls in the middle/low end of the spectrum at 20 cents per gallon. The second lowest after Alaska is Wyoming at 14.5 cents a gallon. If you have a diesel, your federal fuel tax is 24.4 cents a gallon. I’m sure truckers everywhere appreciate that, and don’t think for a minute that cost doesn’t get passed along to you in hirer prices for manufactured goods and groceries.

Last, and least, is the combined cost of transport, distribution and marketing. That gallon of gas does not magically appear at your local station, and it is somewhat ironic that a small percentage of the cost of a gallon of gas is the cost of the diesel fuel it took to power the tanker truck to delivered the gas to the station from local storage tank farm.

The one person in this whole mess who is making the least off of this deal is the station owner. Generally, their mark up is between 3 and 10 cents a gallon. If you use a credit card which charges the retailer a percentage of the sale as a transaction fee, you’ve just cost him money not only on your sale but several others as well. That’s why most gas stations make most of their profits on cokes and candy.

Always at work in this process is the law of supply and demand. When the supply of oil exceeds demand, the commodity price generally falls and vice versa. Little things like Iran chest thumping in the Straits of Hormuz or Israel getting into it with anyone tends to make the oil investors skittish driving the price up a touch. A refinery explosion or a hurricane such as Katrina in 2005 that bullseyes a major petrochem area will significantly impact refining capacity which reduces the supply of the end product again impacting pricing in the same way that seasonal driving habits impact pricing through demand.

So, why do I bring this up? Have you listened to the presidential campaign rhetoric? Do any of you believe those horse thieves will be able to do ANYTHING about gas prices? Not bloody likely. Drill here, drill now is a great sound bite; but, without the refinery capacity to do something with it, it’s only hot air.

Now, pardon me while I go look at used car listings for a cheap, econ box to drive to work.

A Quick Consumer Product and Service Review: HTC EVO and Sprint

Recently, The Queen and I made the decision to switch from AT&T Wireless to Sprint. The decision was not without some mild trepidation as I had been with AT&T since 1996, and The Queen had had Sprint back in the dark ages before we were married. She had had more than one bad customer service experience with Sprint. I clearly remember her frustration which led to my frustration with simple things like paying a bill or correcting an error. Then there was the fact that Sprint's network was atrociously bad with dropping calls and such. 

Fast forward to 2011. Our contract with AT&T had been expired for over a year, and our iPhones (second generation 3G) were becoming difficult to deal with (meaning they were slower than polar bear snot in a blizzard and updating the software was no help). Apparently, it is all part of Steve Jobs' evil plan to force you to buy the latest iPhone # whatever instead of continuing to service a perfectly useful product. I decided that it was time to check out what the other carriers had to offer and see if the Android phones were worth all the hype. 

Enter Sprint. They offered the HTC EVO at a reasonable (at least reasonable to me) price as the HTC EVO 3D had just come out, and their shared minutes family plan with unlimited text and data included was a big selling point especially considering that AT&T recently went to tiered data plan where you have to pay extra for unlimited anything. The total bill for Sprint's service was going to work out to about $20 less per month for double the minutes and unlimited data and text versus limited data and text with AT&T.

What could go wrong? Right?

Where to start? Let's start with the phone. That's the simplest place to begin. With the exception of one big honking, glaring, roadside flare of a battery issue, I really like the phone much better than I did the iPhone. The Queen...not so much. She has been mourning the loss of her iPhone ever since we left the Sprint store even though complained loudly for months before we made the switch about how slow her phone was and how frustrated she was. I can't win for losing. The Queen hates the phone, I think, because it's not like her iPhone. At the core of that is the battery issue with which I agree with her wholeheartedly. 

The battery on the HTC EVO flat out sucks. When we got our iPhones we were not used to how much smartphones went through battery life. We learned some relatively easy tricks to extend the battery charge, and we were happy. The iPhones wouldn't outlast a regular cell phone on battery life, but they'd make it through a full day of data usage and talking without needing a recharge every five minutes. The HTC EVO's battery makes the iPhone battery look like the Energizer bunny by comparison. It's phenomenally bad. 

For instance, I plug it in to the charger at night and use the phone as my alarm clock. The alarm goes off, I sorta kinda wake up, take the phone off the charger and take it with me into the bathroom to check email and such while I get ready for my day. In the span of the 15 to 20 minutes that it takes me to go through my morning ritual, the battery has been drained by about 10%. Apparently, that big freaking display that I love so much about the EVO accounts for 88% of the power used by the phone since it came off the charger this morning.

To be completely fair, I really do like everything else about the phone. I like the display a lot better than I do the iPhone's display. The apps seem to work better although there are some slight differences between the Apple version and Android version of identical apps like Facebook which take a little getting used to. Once you spend a day tinkering with the phone, you've figured out most of the quirks. The only thing that I think the iPhone does a little better than the droid is the contacts list. This is balanced out by the droid's smart dialing system. Want to call Bob? Any Bob. Dial 262 on the phone, and the Bobs in your contact list are presented for your selection. 

Anyway, I could have lived with the battery life issue by doing what a young friend of ours did...he bought a bigger frikkin' battery. If that were all it was, I think we could have been happy. But, nooOOOOoooo!. Sprint had to be difficult. For the past two weeks, I've heard nothing from The Queen but how bad the phone was, that it was dropping calls, etc. I was in the car with her during one of those times when a call was dropped, and it just happened to be in an area where I had consistently dropped calls with the iPhone. It told her so and suggested that that spot might just be a deadzone out of line of sight of any towers. She was skeptical but let it go for the time being; however, her complaints resumed the next day.

Things came to a head on Tuesday as The Queen and I were driving in separate cars to my mother's house. We were to be doing some house sitting this week while Mom was out of town. We took two cars as I would have to come back to our house to take care of work, our animals and other things. Whilst we were traveling from home and hearth at Castle Erickson to where Fortress Mimi is located in the hinterlands of the frontier, we were in the midst of a heated discussion about matters which do not concern my fair readers when the call was dropped. Right in the middle of a fair sized town on state highway. No signal. Zap. Discussion over. We were without cell signal for over 15 miles until we got to the interstate highway. Even then, our resumed call was dropped yet again in between small towns on the interstate. Oddly enough, we could send and receive texts while in radio silence mode.

Oh. HELL. No.

I drove back and forth between Dallas and Houston for two years with very rare dropped calls on AT&T's network due to loss of signal that lasted less than a mile. I called people from the top of a 10,000 plus foot tall mountain using my AT&T cell phone outside of Jackson Hole, Wyoming. I've driven this exact same stretch of road between Castle Erickson and Fortress Mimi for as long as I've owned a cell phone without ever having had a dropped call with AT&T's network. Fifteen plus miles of no signal on a major state highway is UNACCEPTABLE. Period. End of story.

I will give Sprint kudos for one thing. The young lady who helped us when we signed up for service was super nice and helpful. I can only hope they are as helpful and nice when I go back in on Sunday to tell them we are taking advantage of their 30 day money back guarantee to go back to AT&T. If not, you'll be hearing about it. 

Your mileage may vary.

Yet Another Sign That The Economy is in the Toilet

I know that the country is in the midst of a recession/depression depending on which horse thief's doom and gloom report you happen to be listening to at any given moment, but there has to be a limit to the lengths to which companies will go to stimulate consumer spending.

Apparently not.

Not more than 30 minutes ago, on Saturday evening, August 22, the queen and I were vegetating in front of the TV when it happened. I'm glazing over while some commercial or other drones on about blah, blah, blah; and, out of the corner of my consciousness, I hear the words "we're bringing back the Christmas bonus sale".

??????

It's August! We haven't even gotten through the back to school sale ads yet much less the brief interlude of Halloween and Thanksgiving ads. Football season hasn't even properly begun yet. The Rangers have another month at least before the crater completely, and we are already hearing the C word in retail advertising.

I knew the economy was in a shambles when our elected horse thieves began bailing out one eyed, left handed, midget manicurists, but I had no idea things were this desperate. I suppose it could be worse, though. Like TV ads with Santa Claus lighting off fireworks for the Fourth of July followed in a year or two by a no holds barred, cage fight match up between St. Nick and St. Patrick in mid March.

You can spend your hard earned scratch how you like. You can be like some people I know who got suckered into trading a perfectly good, paid for car to get a brand spanking new car payment they couldn't afford thanks to the government's Cash for Fools Going Conspicuously Into Debt So We Can Bail Out The Auto Industry program. As for me, I'm betting my money on the drunken Irish guy in green.