Here’s an ominous thought buried in a Star-Ledger story:
Inside, Empro Products makes the ubiquitous numeric signs found at gas stations. The phone rings quite a bit these days.
“In the last two weeks we’ve been getting hit hard for digit number 4,” said Vinnie Verma, Empro’s general manager. “We’ve also gotten a very limited number of calls for 5s.”
It has become a question of when, not if, gas prices hit $4 per gallon, and station operators want to be prepared.
The company supplies signs to most service stations in the mid-Atlantic and New England states.
(emphasis added)
I think $4/gallon is a given. Yesterday I paid $3.859/gallon in a Hartford suburb, because I was running a little lower than I’d like (I topped off later for $3.799); while pumping my precious standard unleaded, I got to see the numbers “4.099″ staring at me from the premium unleaded side of the pump.
Mercifully, there wasn’t a diesel pump on that island at the gas station.
I know that gas is still comparatively cheap in the U.S., but $5/gallon is till not pleasant to think about, when some of my earliest memories are of $0.289/liter gas in one of the gas crises in the 70’s, followed later by $0.599/gallon after normalcy returned.