The Similkameen News Leader
Editorial
WHO'S HOSING WHOM?
May 22, 2007
Remember when Bob and Doug MacKenzie first made the term 'hoser' popular?
Well, it's about to make a come back and this time it's the oil companies hosing consumers at the gas pumps.
We usually expect gas prices to slowly climb in accordance with the increase in highway traffic but over $1.20 per litre is a little insane.
We would like to point out that it's not the fault of the local gas station owners/operators as they still earn so little per litre of gas pumped we now understand why the average gas station has a convenience store either attached to it or located inside.
We suspect the really successful convenience stores were once gas stations with snack corners that only really started making money when the gas tanks were pulled out of the ground.
Chips and pop are obviously where the real money is, not in pumping gas.
Now that we think of it, it would be great if Pepsi or Old Dutch ran the oil companies. At least that way you'd know that on every long weekend there would be some sort of combo sale. Buy two litres of pop at regular price and two litres of gas would be 99¢ plus taxes, plus deposit.
Sporting events like SuperBowl, Grey Cup and the Stanley Cup along with New Year's and Canada Day would be when they'd dust off those potato chip deals.
And it wouldn't be on those crappy little vending machine size bags of chips, either.
We're talking the bonus size bag of (pick your favourite flavour ours is 'All Dressed') buy one for 99¢ and get a litre of gas for 99¢. Limit of five. We may even see a deal on dip. Buy two of your favourite chip dips at regular price and get a litre of oil free!
Call us a dip stick if you will, but we think there's something to this.
Hey, at least with Pepsi and Old Dutch calling the shots we'd get some deals on gas instead of with the oil companies and their buddies (Translation: government) who tend to like increasing prices to remind us that they are really in control. Or more precisely, to remind them that they think we think they are in control.
We received 'the e-mail' most everyone else got suggesting the way to get the point across was to not buy gas on May 15th. We didn't only because we didn't need any that day.
What we need to do to get the point across is to quit driving. But since that will probably not happen, we should ask of our elected officials that they demand some sort of solution to stop the hosing at the gas hose so we can all just go back to being
hosers.
