Michael Giberson
Would someone please check current prices for bread in the towns of Greenwich, Port Chester, and Stamford, Connecticut? A December 23 story in the Greenwich Time notes the arrival, finally, of gasoline prices below $2/gallon in Greenwich, “after weeks of being surrounded by less-than-$2 in gas in municipalities such as Stamford and Port Chester. ” The story suggests that prices are higher in Greenwich due to zone pricing. In the words of the story, zone pricing is “a practice under which refiners sell gasoline to retailers at prices depending on what the market in a particular geographic area will bear.”
Anyway, I’m wondering whether bread prices differ much from Greenwich to Port Chester to Stamford, and if they do I further wonder whether wholesale bakeries practice “zone pricing” of bread, too. After all, late in the story a customer is quoted as saying that “Everything’s more expensive [in Greenwich],” and if everything is more expensive in Greenwich then maybe zone pricing of gasoline by refiners is not the fundamental cause.
Zone pricing has been banned in neighboring New York, but some people in the Hampton’s think the law is being ignored.
For background, see earlier my posts: Gasoline prices in New York three weeks after the zone pricing ban; Zone pricing ban coming to New York, will the results affirm policymakers’ hopes or economists’ analyses?)