Category Archives: Regulation

Norwalk Connecticut Gas Station Settles on Charges of Sandy-Related Price Gouging

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Michael Giberson

When it comes to gasoline price increases, how much do prices have to rise before a price increase is “unconscionably excessive”? What difference between prices before and after a declaration of emergency is large enough to create a “gross disparity”? Twenty percent? Ten percent? Five?

In Connecticut these days it looks like a mere 2.25 percent price increase after a big storm is a sufficient danger to the consuming public to invite the wrath of Conn.’s Department of Consumer Protection. As reported in a DCP press release:

A  Norwalk Shell gasoline station has signed an agreement with the Department of Consumer Protection and has paid $1,449 to the agency to settle allegations that the station raised its retail gas price by 10 cents per gallon on November 1, 2012, without there being a corresponding increase in wholesale gas prices for that day. The conduct occurred in the immediate aftermath of Storm Sandy. State law prohibits fuel suppliers from charging unconscionably excessive prices during times of abnormal market disruptions, such as storm-related disasters.

“Given that the state was in a period of abnormal market disruption due to the severe impact of Storm Sandy, we determined that the Shell station’s 10-cent per gallon increase was not justified and constituted an unconscionably excessive price for gasoline,” Consumer Protection Commissioner William M. Rubenstein said today.  “The retailer sold 4,830 gallons of gasoline that day at the increased price, but we are requiring him to disgorge three times the amount of that unfair profit.”

The Shell station is known as Connecticut Avenue Shell and is located at 307 Connecticut Avenue, Norwalk.  While the station does not admit to any wrongdoing, it entered into the agreement, which requires it to pay $1,449 to the Department of Consumer Protection for its complaint resolution, education and enforcement programs.

A newspaper account fills in some details: a few days after November 1 the newspaper observed that Connecticut Avenue Shell was charging $4.55 at a time when many stations in the area were charging between $3.95 and $4.05. (A check of connecticutgasprices.com supports the view that the station regularly charges higher prices than other stations in the area.)

Assuming the price was $4.45 for the days leading up to November 1, the 10-cent change constituted a 2.25 percent increase in the price charged for regular unleaded gasoline at the station.

No doubt the retailer concluded that $1,449 was less than its lawyers would have charged to fight the allegation, and so it took the commercially expedient route of settling with the state. Still, the settlement puts a pretty tight cap on future retailers who may wish to raise prices during times the state has asserted a market disruption.

Lessons from Lance

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Lynne Kiesling

So now we at least know something direct from the horse’s mouth about Lance Armstrong’s use of performance-enhancing drugs before and during his long run of commanding Tour de France performances. In addition to the interview with Oprah Winfrey, this CBS 60 Minutes segment and this Cycling News interview with Armstrong provide fuller details. If you do not follow cycling or have not been following these events, Juliet Macur’s New York Times story from January 6 provides a good summary. (By the way, Juliet Macur, ESPN’s Bonnie Ford, and WSJ’s Jason Gay (here and here recently) are outstanding journalists and writers whose insights and knowledge have been essential reading on cycling for years, not just in dissecting l’affaire Armstrong).

Having followed cycling since the mid-1980s, my sense is that Armstrong is right that PED use is endemic in quite a few sports, including cycling. But it’s not universal. I also think that Armstrong is choosing his words carefully, and in a very calculated manner is trying to walk the fine line between saying enough to get some reputation capital back and be readmitted to professional racing (in triathlon this time, as in his early career) and saying so much that he re-triggers the federal lawsuit about his alleged conspiracy to distribute and use illegal substances, which would land him in jail.

What I find the most personally disturbing is his callous willingness to treat other people as means to an end, one end, his winning the Tour as many times as possible. The bullying and the backing of young, eager, naive athletes into Faustian corners is unforgivable. For that alone I’d deny him a USA Triathlon license. But I’m a very strong believer in private ordering through reputation and strong social norms, probably a stronger believer in them than the general population.

Some observers, including my good friends at Reason, argue that we should allow PED use in professional sports. I disagree, for two reasons, one physiological and one moral. In sports like cycling, the blood doping is intended to increase the oxygen content of the blood and to accelerate recovery from endurance activity. It does that, but it does that differently for each person, because each person has a different baseline blood oxygen content (hematocrit) and each person responds differently to augmentation. It’s not just a parallel shift that “raises all boats” equivalently. So if you are a rider with a low hematocrit who responds well to doping and you beat a rider with a higher hematocrit who responds less to doping, what have you achieved? Who’s the better cyclist on that day?

And that gets to the moral reason why I think we should continue to have sanctions against PED use in sports. Sports, whether professional or recreational, are meaningless unless they are grounded in the deeply human institutions of fair play. We have evolved a sense of fair play for a reason. Abandoning that institution with respect to PED use in professional sports would abandon fair play, would turn sports into nothing more than a “bread and circus” spectacle to entertain the masses in the manner of the Roman gladiators, and would feed back into youth sports with very perverse and negative incentives that would undermine the physical, psychological, and moral benefits we derive from participating in sports. If we relinquish fair play in sports we relegate sports to meaningless decadence. I can’t support that. Nor does the evolution of our institutions through human history match with that decision.

Which gets me to Roger Pielke Jr.’s very insightful post in which he argues that sports need stronger institutions. I really encourage you to read his post, because he does a very good job of summarizing the complicated institutional framework in which many sports operate. Cycling is an Olympic sport, and it also involves competitions (like the Tour de France and the Giro d’Italia) run by international organizations. It also has a governance organization, the UCI, which has come in for a lot of justifiable criticism regarding its transparency and its enforcement of its private rules against doping (in fact, I think it hasn’t come in for enough criticism and that lots of heads need to roll, but that’s for another post). Roger’s post also highlights the awkward nexus of the International Olympic Committee (and the USOC) and its private sanctions against doping, the non-governmental organization that is charged with monitoring and enforcing these sanctions (WADA, and in the US, USADA), and the treatment of PED use in sports by various international governments. In particular, in many other countries enforcement does involve governments and PED use violations are subject to criminal prosecution, while under US law they are treated as private matters as long as the substances are not themselves illegal. Of course, this line gets crossed all the time, as we see when Congress gets a burr under its saddle and hauls ex-baseball players up to testify about PED use.

And that’s where I think l’affaire Armstrong and the US government’s pursuit of him and how USADA plays into that should make us all pause and consider the implications of this government power more broadly. Last week in Wired, Brian Alexander wrote that the Armstrong case and USADA’s role in it should make you, and me, and each of us worry:

So here’s the thing you need to know: The USADA takedown of Armstrong matters, and it could effect everybody. Because it will enhance the power and reach of a private, non-profit business that has managed to harness the power of the federal government in what’s quickly becoming a brand new war on drugs … with all the same pitfalls brought to you by the first war on drugs.

The USADA is a private outfit. Yet it gets taxpayer money. And it has existed in this weird legal nether world since its creation in 1999 at the instigation of the International Olympic Committee, United States Olympic Committee, and President Clinton’s White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. The USADA is designated by the U.S. Congress as the company that handles anti-doping for this country, because the World Anti-Doping Treaty — a UNESCO-promulgated document that the U.S. signed with almost no discussion – obligates the U.S. to do a number of things, which includes conforming our laws to the international anti-doping code. …

The USADA has wanted Armstrong for years. To it, and to the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), Armstrong was Moby Dick: If they could kill the whale – and do it without a raft of positive tests to show Armstrong doped – a new model of anti-doping would be enshrined into practice. And that’s just what happened.

Piggy-backing on a federal investigation, the USADA was able to pressure Armstrong teammates to confess to doping and implicate Armstrong … with no positive test results. It was an FBI-style investigation spanning multiple countries, but there was no “smoking syringe” found stuck in Armstrong’s arm. …

So while you might wish athletes didn’t dope — I do, too — and want action taken to combat doping, you might also want to be careful about what you’re wishing for. Especially since sports is taking on a broader definition that includes amateurs, low-level marathon runners, and even your kid’s high school football team.

I’ve excerpted Alexander’s argument, but I do encourage you to read it fully for a better understanding of exactly how sobering the implications are.

That’s what I think there are a lot of disturbing lessons from Lance, and from the USADA’s pursuit of him. Both his craven conduct and lack of character and the sinister implications of his prosecution bode ill in ways that will diminish sports that we love, as spectators and as participants. And they increase the authority of the state in ways that we’ve already seen are destructive.

Hoffman on price gouging (in which I take on claims made in a 7-year old blog post)

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While seeking out the guns and ammo price gouging post at Mother Jones (see link here) I came across a post-Katrina 2005 Political Mojo post by Bradford Plumer on price gouging that I don’t recall having seen before, and it provides a link to a Dave Hoffman post-Katrina post at PrawfsBlawg that actually advances some empirical claims in favor of state anti-price gouging laws. Most advocates of state price gouging controls rely on arguments that come down to “I don’t think it is fair so those sellers shouldn’t be able to do it.”

(ASIDE: There is an empirical claim embedded there too – whether or not the advocate actually thinks post-emergency price increases are unfair – but the feelings of editorialists are not normally significant factors in formal policy analysis.)

Here are a few of Hoffman’s more substantive claims:

  1. “In civil emergencies, markets don’t work to clear information in rational ways.”
  2. “High prices will not serve to reduce demand for, say, water and gasoline, over the short term if folks think their lives are going to depend on having such commodities nearby.”
  3. “Price gouging regulations do two things to reduce panic and regulate demand.  First, they increase trust in market transactions (an SEC-like role) and thus will act to reduce “panic demand” in emergencies without increasing price.”
  4. “Second, the regulations – when publicized appropriately – have the same information forcing effect as higher prices themselves, teaching people that there are supply interruptions and they should change their use patterns until conditions improve.”

My responses:

1. Claim #1 depends on what he means by “rational,” but my expectation is that prices do the same work of helping coordinate buyers and sellers during emergencies as before and after. Yes it is true that during times of quick changes in conditions that more of those prices may turn out to be “wrong” in the sense of too high or too low, but the pre-emergency price is almost assuredly wrong in this same sense and so will likely guarantee that outcomes won’t achieve his rationality standard however he chooses to define that term.

In any case, with a manageable definition of “rationality,” we could explore empirically whether freely-adjusting prices do better or worse than alternative price rules in helping to better clear information rationally. (By “clear information in rational ways” I take Hoffman to be referring to the market’s imperfect-but-still-normally-useful ability to reveal where goods are most highly needed.)

2. It is absolutely true that when it comes to cases in which our lives hang in the balance, consumers will do things that would otherwise be crazy. Would you pay $100 for a bottle of water? Normally no, but if I would die without it then yes. (And if I were about to die for lack of water, I should probably go to the emergency room, not the supermarket. The irony, of course, is that the emergency room would charge $100 to provide the water.)

As an empirical claim about consumer behavior, at least with respect to almost all market transactions during civil emergencies covered by price gouging laws, I’d say he is wrong but at least this is potentially testable. But to the extent we are talking about life and death, I’d say the relevance of his point to price gouging policy is essentially nil. A hurricane hits the Gulf Coast and suddenly state officials in New York and Massachusetts are warning gasoline retailers not to use the hurricane as an excuse to raise prices excessively. No New Yorker is going to die from a Gulf Coast hurricane because gasoline prices on Long Island jumped from $3.50 to $4.75 for a few days.

Of the millions of retail transactions conducted under activated state price gouging regulations, my guess is that fewer than 0.01 of a percent of them involved life and death. In the actual post-emergency retail sales covered by most price gouging laws consumers are quite capable of weighing whether they need four days of bottled water or fourteen,  whether they really need to top off a nearly full gasoline tank again, and if they can get by with two batteries instead of eight, and so on.

3. The empirical claim suggested by standard economics seems contrary to Hoffman’s claim on panic buying. Since emergencies are times of heightened demand and limited supply, some panic demand and hoarding behavior is typical. Artificially low prices are more likely to result in shortages, therefore are more likely to prompt consumers to rush to stock up on supplies. Price gouging controls, in this standard economics story, promote “panic buying.” Two things that would reduce panic buying: (a) consumer confidence that stores will not run out of goods, and/or (b) belief that prices will tend to fall rather than increase over the next few days.

It might be the case that with price gouging laws on the books a consumer doesn’t have to worry about unjustified price increases, but I don’t see the connection between added trust in the market and a consumer’s decision to stock up on supplies right away rather than later. I feel like I must be missing Hoffman’s point.

4. The claim that publicized price gouging enforcement will yield the same kind of “forcing effect” of higher prices, i.e. induce equivalent conservation of newly scarcer goods and services, is eminently testable. The comparable situation in electric power might by those hot summer afternoons during which the utility (mayor, governor, etc.) calls on power consumers to help protect system reliability by voluntarily cutting demand. These voluntary calls for conservation work in the strict technical sense that some people will reduce their consumption. But compare the response rate to that among power consumers with a direct economic incentive to cut back consumption during these power system emergencies, and I’m sure publicizing emergency conditions has nothing at all like the same kind of “forcing effect” as simple economic incentives.

And, of course, it is simply not possible that, say, Governor Christie’s disaster declaration could contain all of the necessary information about which goods are now going to become how-much-more scarce in which parts of the state for how long, and how much one consumer’s needs should weigh against another consumer’s needs, etc.

Hoffman declares his motives in his concluding paragraph: “I dislike folks who intentionally profit on others’ misfortune.” Personally, I’m not so worried about intentions and I’m not  worried about degree of profits. I simply want to support public policies that are best at helping people in distress get useful goods and services at reasonable terms and conditions.

Now, of course, Hoffman is for helping people in distress just like I’m for helping people in distress. The debate here isn’t which one of us secretly hates puppies, but rather which policies will work best for the people affected by emergencies. My empirical claim is that normal public policies towards retailers and pricing do a better job in helping people in distress than anti-price gouging laws do.

ALSO: See Hoffman’s follow-up post, still from September 2005, in which he reacts to some of the comments to his first piece. I now notice that some of those 7+ year old comments beat me to the punch on points I’ve made above. Hoffman suggests the ‘hotel problem’ is more interesting than the gasoline station problem. Here is my ‘hotel problem’ price gouging argument: Hotel rate price gouging during snowstorms can promote public safety.

A call for controlled experimentation in California’s energy efficiency programs

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Michael Giberson

UC-Berkeley economist Catherine Wolfram has an op-ed in the Sacramento Bee advocating the state use controlled experimentation to discover with energy efficiency programs work best. As she explains, retailers are increasingly using experimentation and advanced data analysis to discover how to increase sales. Surely, she suggests, when planning to spend nearly half a billion tax dollars annually on energy efficiency California ought to devote a bit of effort into separating programs that sound good and work well from those that merely sound good.

[HT to Elizabeth M. Bailey at Energy Economics Exchange.]

New group formed to promote research in U.S. electric power markets

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Michael Giberson

Last week saw announcement of the Electric Markets Research Foundation. The group plans “to fund unbiased research that will examine the track records of centralized electricity markets and traditionally regulated markets in providing affordable and reliable supplies of power as well as meeting clean energy, transmission and environmental needs.” The news release continues:

“There is a dearth of research available on this market-versus-regulation debate and little analysis has been conducted on this 50-state experiment. The Electric Markets Research Foundation intends to address this by supporting research by academics and industry experts on major electric market issues, including customer rates, reliability and service,” said Bruce S. Edelston, the foundation’s president and the driving force behind the research effort.

The governance group looks a little heavy on DC-oriented policy folks, except for Albert Danielsen, a long-time professor of economics at the University of Georgia and executive director of the Bonbright Center for Public Utilities at U. of G. I guess we’ll have to count on Danielsen to keep an eye on the lobbyists.

I’m looking forward to their efforts.

Price gouging on guns?

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Michael Giberson

Newly showing up in the “price gouging” news searches: claims of price gouging on guns. From a news report on the Atlanta Gun Show:

“This gun show hasn’t seen this amount of people come through the door in 10 years. It’s very busy,” said [vendor Monique] Migneault.

And the number of people isn’t the only thing that increased.

“Stuff’s way up on prices. Any kind of assault rifle, they’re up there. It’s bad,” said [shopper Brandon] Jessup.

[Another shopper, Michael] Roberts noticed the same thing.

“I bought an AK-47 last year for $600 and this year it’s close to $1,200. The same exact gun,” said Roberts.

Jessup called it price gouging, but vendors said it’s not.

“We can’t get these guns for the same price we did six months ago, or even last week for that matter. They’ve actually gone up since last Wednesday, so we have to pass that on to customers, so as a business we can stay afloat and maintain our status quo,” said Migneault.

And from another gun show in North Carolina:

Organizer Joel Koehler, [said] “People keep coming and coming and coming” …

He added the only cancellations he had were vendors who were sold out and didn’t have inventory. …

Gun dealer Dean Barr said his business is booming.

“We sold in one month what we normally sell in a year. December was a record month in gun sales all time,” said Barr.

Barr said even thought prices have doubled for the most popular firearms, he is protecting his livelihood, not capitalizing on tragedy.

“People look at dealers or distributors and think they are price gouging, remember this happened before the Christmas shutdown. Nobody has been making guns for two or three weeks,” added Barr.

Price gouging also mentioned in news stories about gun shows in Oklahoma City and Forth Worth, and in gun owners online forums, and industry sites. Prices are up at Michigan gun shows too.

In my Regulation magazine article on price gouging I said price gouging claims require three factors: a price judged unfairly high, an emergency or difficult situation, and a product or service useful in responding to the emergency. According to these reports, prices for guns and high-capacity magazines are reportedly double that of a year ago. The emergency is a bit more abstract, but arises from the concern that changes in law may ban certain popular types of guns and related equipment. The easiest way to beat the possible new restrictions is to stock up now, making guns and magazines goods that are useful in responding to the emergency.

Now, I wonder if any of these sharp price increases happened during declared states of emergency in states with anti-price gouging laws, or in states with anti-price gouging laws not requiring a declaration of emergency?

What is regulatory capture?

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Lynne Kiesling

Regulatory capture is one of the defining phenomena in the political economy of regulation. What is regulatory capture, exactly? In a Tech Liberation post from 2010, Adam Thierer offers this definition:

“Regulatory capture” occurs when special interests co-opt policymakers or political bodies — regulatory agencies, in particular — to further their own ends.  Capture theory is closely related to the “rent-seeking” and “political failure” theories developed by the public choice school of economics.  Another term for regulatory capture is “client politics,” which according to James Q. Wilson, “occurs when most or all of the benefits of a program go to some single, reasonably small interest (and industry, profession, or locality) but most or all of the costs will be borne by a large number of people (for example, all taxpayers).”  (James Q. Wilson, Bureaucracy, 1989, at 76).

This short video from Susan Dudley at George Washington University provides a concise introduction to the concept:

As she points out, one of the consistent outcomes arising from regulatory capture is that the regulated industry can use regulation in ways to increase its benefits at the expense of consumers.

In the post quoted above, Adam does a great service by generating a compendium of quotes from economists and other analysts about regulatory capture and he’s added to this list since the original post. His chronological list gives you a good sense of how pervasive the phenomenon is of politically-connected interests to shape regulation to their own advantage.

Regulatory capture: putting the “crony” in crony capitalism for as long as regulations and politics have existed.

Economics research topics in price gouging from odd-even rationing to guilt and shame

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Michael Giberson

Today the Master Resource blog published my list of ten price gouging topics needing economic research.

As I point out in the introduction, many economists think price gouging  is too simple to be worth studying. After all, it is just a kind of price cap, and we know how price caps work. My response is that “too simple to be worth studying” is losing the policy battle.

Here is my list of ten topics, see the post at Master Resource for explanations and scattered links to related discussions:

  1. Economics of odd-even rationing
  2. Shortages and the hoarding impulse
  3. Distributional effects of price gouging prohibitions
  4. Non-price rationing techniques: queuing and beyond
  5. Short-run elasticity of supply after disasters
  6. Short-run elasticity of demand after disasters
  7. Organizational form and price gouging enforcement
  8. Economics of consumer price complaints
  9. Studies of price gouging enforcement
  10. Efficiency defenses of price gouging laws

As a bonus for Knowledge Problem readers only, here is a hot, hot, hot behavioral economics research topic as well:

11. Guilt, shame, trust and fairness in pricing after disasters

Economists are increasingly realizing that it takes much more to make markets work than formal rules and freely moving prices. A host of issues sometimes styled as “culture” or “informal institutions” are also critical in getting things to work. (An aside: I’m looking forward to seeing Virgil Storr’s new book, Understanding the Culture of Markets.)

Guilt, shame, and betrayal are joining reputation as social-psychological factors important to economic activity and respectable enough for economists to work on. Does shaming “price gouging” behavior work to stop post-disaster price increases? Does shaming price gougers encourage or discourage pro-social interaction after a disaster? (I.e. do merchants work harder to bring goods to market yet keep prices low, or do merchants allow shelves to go bare and avoid engaging in costly efforts to resupply?)

Related video from Fox news reporter Arnold Diaz: Shame! Shame! Shame! for Price Gougers.

Also, a letter to the editor in New Jersey proposes the Scarlet Letter approach to shaming convicted price gougers (though the writer omits my related suggestion to also shame consumers who choose to participate in price gouging then call in complaints to the attorney general).

New York newspaper says “add shame to penalty for gouging”

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Michael Giberson

Is price gouging like highway robbery? The Journal News, from the suburbs north of New York City, said: “Add shame to penalty for gouging“:

Given the extraordinary cost of just about everything in New York, it is often difficult to distinguish price-gouging, which is both illegal and despicable, from the usual highway robbery, which is just sort of expected. Then there are those merchants, as seen during Superstorm Sandy, who make the distinction so abundantly clear that all doubt is removed. Stiff fines and restitution should await these offenders, should the allegations hold up; a measure of public shaming ought to be part of the menu of sanctions as well.

Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, following up on familiar pre-storm threats and warnings, announced enforcement actions Thursday against a dozen gas station operators who allegedly kicked motorists when they were down — after rampaging Sandy darkened many gasoline stations, disrupted gasoline supplies and caused consumers, many toting gasoline cans, to endure interminable waits outside stations. Long lines and even rationing weren’t all that they faced.

For example, there were Mobil stations in Katonah, at 80 Bedford Road, and in Spring Valley, at 189 Route 59, where gasoline sold for $4.79 and $4.65, respectively, according to the allegations from the AG’s Office. Those prices — like all the charges highlighted by Schneiderman — were for a gallon of regular, and decidedly higher than normal, even in this high-cost region.

There was the BP station in Elmont where the price was an attention-getting $6.99; prices at the Shell in East Elmhurst, according to complaints, ranged from $4.89 to $7.90.

But they had nothing on the purported gouging leader, the Mobil at 3424 East Tremont Avenue in the Bronx, “where a consumer waiting in line for over an hour was just three cars from the pump when she was told that she would be charged $50 for five gallons of gasoline — $10 per gallon.” Stations nearby charged $3.95.

If I may interject, I think it is useful to distinguish between cases of suddenly higher prices and cases in which stations charge higher than the publicly posted price.

The “Stations nearby charged $3.95″ will be an incomplete accounting of the cost, since they must have had lines too. It would be great if the New York Attorney General’s office collected data on time spent in lines, might be useful in helping to calculate the full cost of low station prices.

Continue reading →

New Yorkers didn’t ‘share the pain’ of higher gasoline prices during emergency

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Michael Giberson

One idea advanced by proponents of anti-price gouging laws is that after disaster strikes people should put aside their usual self-interests, join in with the community, and share in the burden of recovery. What these proponents often miss is that normal market adjustments will support a sharing in the burden of recovery, even among those lacking much in the way of charitable impulses, when prices are relatively free to adjust.

Prices go up in the disaster zone, supplies are diverted from elsewhere, prices go up elsewhere, people elsewhere cut back a little in response to higher prices, and there we have it: sharing the pain. Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” is a helping hand to those in need.

But the actions of the “invisible hand” were constrained by the very visible hand of the state. In both New York and New Jersey state officials were prominently threatening to slap businesses with thousands of dollars in fines if prices went up too much. Prices did go up a bit in the disaster struck area, but not enough to prompt extraordinary efforts from elsewhere. New York saw none of that normal, voluntary response to changing supply and demand conditions elsewhere, and post-disaster sacrifices remained concentrated mostly in the hardest hit areas.

Consider the price chart below, which shows regular gasoline prices in Albany, Buffalo, and New York City, all in New York State, from June of 2011 through the end of November 2012. Typically these prices move up and down together with just a little localized variation. Beginning at the end of October 2012, during Sandy and its aftermath, prices in the New York City moved sharply higher for nearly two weeks. In New York state outside the disaster-struck area, however, gasoline prices barely slowed their descent from late summer highs.

18_months_of_NY_pricesGasoline lines? Odd-even rationing? Gasoline stations pumped dry? Yes, but only around the power-out, flooded-out, storm-struck area.

Elsewhere in the state: business as usual but for the occasional invitation to chip in $10 to the Red Cross.

ROCKETS AND FEATHERS NOTE: Interestingly, Buffalo prices pretty consistently show a slower price descent when prices are falling than either New York City or Albany. I recall that at the end of 2008 a Buffalo-area Congressman was complaining about the same thing. See here and here. The second half of 2008 was a time of fairly consistently falling gasoline prices throughout the U.S., interrupted only by a short lived mid-September price spike due to Hurricane Ike. Gasoline price researchers, start your engines.