Army Post Road

     Yeah, the Internet at my apartment hasn't worked for roughly the past week (my laptop got knocked off the table and now the system board needs to be replaced, again) and so I haven't been able to elucidate the world for everyone via this forum.  I'm sitting at my parents' house at the moment waiting for, hopefully, my last load of laundry to finish and to wrap up cleaning out a friend's computer (the thing is horribly loaded down with spyware). 

    So my older sister and I decided to get one big present for our parents and Keely and to add some small presents along with it.  Gift-giving so far this Christmas has been a comedy of errors, at least betwixt my mother and I.  I had said back in early November sometime that I didn't have a coat that I really wanted to wear to work and she and my dad went out on that and bought me a new coat.  In the meantime, due to how quickly it got so fuckin' cold in Iowa City/Cedar Rapids, I went out and bought myself a Carhartt.  The next time I came home, wearing my Carhartt, my mother declared me a dork and told me that luckily she still had the receipt for the work coat she and my dad had got me.  Last night, when I came home from drill, lo and behold there on the ironing board is the book I had bought as the supplementary gift for my mother, Life With Marley.  At that point I called Mom up at work and told her we needed to figure out some way to stop ruining each other's Christmas gifts. 

     The three nights last week I worked at my new store went well.  It was so cold outside that nobody wanted to go out and so we were slow and were able to get everything and get acclimated to the store pretty well.  Switching back to nights has not been an easy process so far. Last week on my nights off before I came to Des Moines I did have a few of those omg-i-should-be-at-the-store and omg-whose-running-the-register-everybody's-running-out-of-the-store-with-everything and dammit-i-came-to-work-naked-again dreams.  Another sign that I'm not made for working nights.  Also, I got next to no sleep the first two days last week which was a bigger problem practically.  Today is probably going to be the same (as I am still in Des Moines and probably won't leave until friggin' 4 or 5 this afternoon) and I hope upon hope that Rachel will be there tonight so I won't have to be totally alone tonight. 

Had an excellent weekend this weekend.  Drill was for the most part a non-event.  The Class-A inspection was stressful 1)because I was late and LTC Hildebrand saw me (when he got to me in the inspection I was “SPC Just-in-time Larkin”) and 2)because I had dog hair all over my uniform and I was missing a few items that belonged on it.

      On a random note:  It's a very awkward feeling to have my portfolio improving as oil, natural gas, and gasoline commodities rise but to feel the pinch when I have to buy gas.  I would like to note for everyone that gas stations (like QuikTrip) do not get any bigger profits as the price you pay for gasoline goes up.  Yes it might improve by a penny or so per gallon but almost always the change in price of a gallon of gasoline is identical to the change in price we pay.  Right now, at 2:23PM the commodity price of gasoline is $1.655/gallon.  Before you have the actual retail price of gasoline, you have to add in federal and state excise taxes (usually $0.15-$0.30 depending on your state and municipality), additive costs (gas comes out of the pipeline as just gasoline; each company [i.e. Shell, QT, HandiMart] adds their own mix of additives) transportation costs (the pipelines and the trucks) and then finally the mark-up that gas stations make up.  When you have high and extremely-high gas prices (like when prices in Iowa were above the $3 mark) gas stations will narrow and narrow the margin they add and eventually they will start selling it below the cost they pay, which was the case when gas was selling in the $3.20, $3.30 area when gas stations were actually paying in the $3.30 - $3.40 range.  Also, people criticized gas stations (a lot of the people I work with would be hopping mad if they knew I kept calling QT a gas station; “It's not just a gas station, it's a convenience store.”  That's just an ego-stroke comment) because the retail price of gasoline did not come back down nearly as fast as the commodity price did.  Yes that's true but you have to realize we lost our shirt when we were selling gas at a discount to what we were paying for it so letting our margins catch back up to where they would normally be as the commodity price was moving lower was done so that we could recoup at least a portion, but in most cases not all, of the money we lost subsidizing gas prices to prices that were at least swallowable in the emergency situation.  The people who profit when energy (oil, gasoline, natural gas and so on) commodity prices are the people who actually take it out of the ground and the people who trade in it in the markets.  Yes, a lot of those companies (ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch-Shell, ConocoPhillips and others) do own the whole process from the oil wells all the way to the gasoline pumps but a lot do not.  QuikTrip is only a gasoline retailer.  Git'n'Go, Kum'n'Go, and Casey's are all only gasoline retailers.  They all do not profit in proportion to the rise and fall of commodity prices.  In addition to that, the private companies like ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips do not control enough oil to directly and purposefully swing the commodity prices.  The only entities that move enough of the commodity itself to move the market on supply alone are the nation-states that directly and specifically control the amount of crude oil drilled and brought to the international market.  Those are the OPEC countries (Saudi Arabia, Iran, Nigeria, Venezuela and so on), Norway, and Russia.  That's not an exhaustive list but it comes close.  They are the ones who have a direct effect on how the price of oil swings every day.  Yes, the price will also move on news from companies such as Exxon and Conoco but they cannot on a daily, monthly, or even really a yearly basis purposefully and intentionally move the price of oil up or down. 

Alright, now that I've given an unexpected, impromptu economics and business lesson, I'm going to sign off.