Traders work in the oil options pit at the New York Mercantile Exchange in New York on Monday. Unlike an iPhone or a pair of jeans or a Big Mac, oil and gasoline are commodities whose prices can change every second. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)By JONATHAN FAHEY
AP Energy Writer
When Jay Ricker, owner of the BP filling station off Interstate 70 in Plainfield, Ind., set the price of unleaded gasoline at $3.44 per gallon on Monday of last week, it was 4 cents higher than the Friday before.
That alone might have been irritating to drivers paying the highest gas prices in more than two years. It was even more so because it happened on a day when the price of crude oil, which is used to make gasoline, fell almost $1 a barrel.
“It’s up 20 cents one day, down 10 cents the next day,” says Oscar Elmore, a courier who was filling up his Ford Taurus at a RaceTrac service station in Dallas recently. “It sounds kinda fishy to me.”