In looking through the Attorney General’s spreadsheet of “price gouging” cases, I decided to look specifically at reported gasoline prices. How many instances of “gouging” were reported, how credible are they, and how much did some reporting consumers decide was too much?
I decided to focus only on regular gasoline. That’s the one most people care about the most, anyway. Also, it was by far the one with the most reports. There were only six reports involving midgrade gasoline, and 19 specifically concerning premium. But for regular gasoline there were 289 reports out of the 712 total “gouging” allegations made.
That doesn’t mean there were 289 separate incidents of gouging. Many of the reports were problematic in several ways. I had to discard 55. Most of those lacked an attempt at a “before” price, a handful didn’t include the “gouging” price, a few didn’t include prices at all or had other problems, and one didn’t name any particular station. Several didn’t show any increase in prices at all, which made me wonder if they were using the “gouging” report to complain about a shortage (which would be ironic).
Of the remainder, 104 reports were duplicate reports of the same stations. (The spreadsheet is chockablock with duplicate reporting, which is another reason why reports that there were “more than 700” instances of price gouging after Hurricane Florence are spurious.) In sorting through the duplicates, I compared the lowest reported “before” price with the highest reported “gouging” price at each reported station.
After sorting through all those data, I made the following findings:
- 172 separate stations reported for “gouging” where one is able to see what a reporting consumer alleged to be “gouging” (prices before vs. after)
- Average price reported at those stations before the hurricane: $2.629/gal.
- Range of prices reported at all stations before the hurricane: from $2.409/gal. to $2.799/gal.
- Average price reported at those stations for “gouging”: $2.949/gal. (an average 32-cent increase, which would cost an extra $4.80 for a 15-gal. fill-up)
- Range of prices reported at all stations after the hurricane: from $2.569/gal. to $6.459/gal.
- Number of reported “gouging” prices post-hurricane that fall in the range of reported pre-hurricane prices: 59 (34%)
- Number of stations (out of 172) reported whose prices increased by 10 cents or less: 49 (28%)
- Number of stations reported whose prices increased by 25 cents or less: 116 (67%)
- Number of stations reported whose prices increased by 50 cents or less: 145 (84%)
- Number of stations reported whose prices increased by less than a dollar: 162 (94%)
- Number of stations reported whose prices increased by more than a dollar: 10 (6%)
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