Find The Cheapest Gas Prices By Local City

Over at GasBuddy.com, they're giving the cheapest local gas prices for different cities.

I'll be honest--it's not a perfect system yet, but the more people that start using it, the more accurate it will become.

So I hearby encourage everybody to go over and start nosing around, then tell your friends about it, so that all of us can just go on the internet in the morning and find the cheapest gas prices on our commute to work.

Sometimes I'll see emails saying to boycott this gas company or that gas company because if everbody boycotts them, that will force the prices down.

That doesn't make any sense.

The price of any product is the result of the balance between supply and demand. If everybody in the country suddenly started using 6 different gas station companies instead of 8, that means more people would be competing for those six station's business.

Think of it this way--let's say four kids on your block sold lemonade. And suddenly, everybody, one day, decided to stop buying from one little kid, no matter what. That would mean the other three kids would run out of lemonade faster. Which means they could start charging more until they had the right price for the new, increased demand to balance out to where they weren't running out of lemonade so fast.

It's the same with gasoline. Buy from less stations, it means increased demand for those stations. That means prices go up.

So the real way to drive the prices down is by buying from whatever station has the cheapest gas, no matter what the brand of the gas is.

So by using something like GasBuddy.com, we can do what we, as consumers in a free market, are supposed to do--be informed about prices, and go with the cheapest one.

Seriously, with Gas being as huge an expense as it's becoming for most of us, can we really afford to just drive around, hoping we'll see a cheap station? Let's get informed.