The price of gasoline is seemingly central to everything right now. The Fed is watching it closely, which means the stock market is watching it closely. The public is focused on it. Gas prices seem to be a determinant of President Joe Biden’s popularity. OK, so what actually determines the price of gasoline? Of course oil is a big driver. But there’s more to it than just oil, including the refiner’s margin, the gas station’s margin and more. To demystify the price of a gallon of gas, Patrick DeHaan, the top petroleum analyst at GasBuddy, came on the podcast. The transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
Joe Weisenthal: (00:10)
Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal. Unfortunately, my co-host Tracy Alloway is off today. Nonetheless, we are gonna hopefully have an important conversation about gasoline.
It's been on this pretty big tumble over the last two months. And of course it's sort of tied to the price of oil. Oil prices have come in, but it feels like there's a lot more to it than just the oil price. It certainly doesn't move just in lockstep with oil. There's refining. There's regional variations. There's variations from one gas station to another literally right next door. So at least to me still, there's still a lot of mystery about, like, why the price of gas is what it is. Why does it always seem to end in 99 cents? I've never, like, gotten an answer to that.
All these things, you know, gas is so central to the economy. Ever since gas started going down, stock prices started going up. Biden's approval ratings started ticking up when gas prices started falling. And of course, vice versa, the price of gas feels like it's the determinant of almost everything these days in American life.
And so why don't we learn what causes the price of gasoline? So to answer all of our questions, or I guess in this case just all of my questions, I wanna bring in Patrick DeHaan. He is the head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy, which is a service that provides price tracking for consumers, tells them where the different prices are at different stations around them.
He's been at GasBuddy for 13 years. He knows everything about the price of gasoline. And if you follow him on Twitter, he is always answering in a pretty direct manner what's going on with gasoline. And when when price is going up, Republicans love him and talk about how terrible the White House is doing. And when the price is going down, everybody flip sides. And meanwhile, he keeps it apolitical. So Patrick, thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots.
Patrick DeHaan: (02:28)
Thanks for having me. It's certainly always fun. You know, when prices go up or down, to see that the movements and watch all the politicians change sides, right. And, and one minute it's great. And the next it's not.
Joe: (02:39)
I mean, that is my impression just for watching your Twitter handle. Like, you are like talking about the price of gasoline and suddenly you see so viscerally how central gasoline is to say American politics by essentially, like, who is attacking you at any given moment for just tweeting out the news.
Patrick: (02:56)
Yeah. That's really true. People have a problem with prices going up and they have a problem with them then coming back down and, you know, one side likes when prices go up or down. It's become very political. We'll just say it that way.
Joe: (03:09)
Well let me ask you a question that I don't think is political at all. It's a super basic question, but is the core of what you do at GasBuddy. And I also think it can maybe help us, like, almost work backwards to figure out the price of gas. But if your app essentially compares what is gas at this corner station versus maybe what you could get if you drive three blocks away or ten blocks away, it immediately raised the question: Why is gas, the price of gasoline, different at one station to another? Why is there variation within gas stations very close to each other?
Patrick: (03:44)
Well, and it it's really loaded and very complex. I'll try to dumb it down, but essentially gasoline like oil and other commodities, the prices that stations are paying will change on a daily basis. There may be different suppliers. There's different competitors. So essentially at the station level, stations are all paying something different, depending on the timing of how much they're buying, who they're buying from.
And with oil so volatile this year because of a lot of these high level factors: the recovery from Covid. The war in Ukraine. The overall economy. The price of oil and gasoline has been moving violently. So one station may get at 25 cents gallon less than another. And so that goes into these various hotspots, but stations also, when prices have been declining, as they've been for the last nine weeks, stations have incredible latitude to either lower their prices very quickly as their cost goes down or kind of more slowly, depending on the timing.
This year stations may have a different financial position. That is they may be hurting when prices went up because as many people do not know, it's oftentimes very hard to be the first one to pass along the price increase. So stations take it on the chin when prices go up and when prices go down, they're in less of a hurry to lower prices. And that can create some of these hotspots where there may be a very aggressive gas station that wants lower prices. And some others may not be so aggressive. And that can cause a lot of variety in what you're paying locally.
Joe: (05:12)
I don't know if there is an average gasoline station... I’m sorry we might just do 30 minutes of my asking extremely rudimentary questions about how gasoline works. So I hope that's cool. But I don't know if there is an average gas station, but to the best you can answer the question, how often do gas stations themselves get a refill and how close to the bottom of their own tanks do they get typically before a refill?
Patrick: (05:43)
Well it depends on the size of the gas station. Some mom and pops may simply order when they need more. Whereas the pros, the companies that may own many stations, may have somebody that buys fuel and looks at markets to know when, to time it. It's like an airfare, right? The airfares change on a daily basis.
And if you wanna fly, you're just gonna buy a airfare. Whereas if you're buying a lot of airfare, you may wait a day, a day or two. So at the station level, stations are adjusting their prices looking at that. But you know, it's, again, going back to the volatility. It's been such a crazy year that not every station has that competitive advantage where somebody can just watch the price that they pay. So bigger stations that have more stores may have a leg up in terms of having somebody that may be in a position to simply watch the markets and to be able to time purchases.
But when prices have gone down, it's all very subject to competition. How quickly prices go down. There's just so many things that go into it, but ultimately now we've seen prices go down for nine weeks. And I think the most frequent thing I've been asked in the last nine weeks is “Why is X town, you know, X cents per gallon, lower than mine?” And it really has to do with just competition and whether or not there's like a status quo. Yeah. Or if there's a wholesale club, if they're aggressive and lowering price, it certainly varies widely.
Joe: (07:05)
I was wondering about the competition question. If there's a town with lots of gas stations and lots of consumer choice, can you sort of empirically show that there is more gas price volatility, or maybe more aggressiveness on pricing than say a single gas station, like in the middle of Death Valley, California, where it might be your only chance to fill up for another hundred miles?
Patrick: (07:31)
Well, it's really fascinating because oftentimes we find that the solo gas stations by themselves are generally the ones that may charge a little bit more, but there are exceptions to the rule and it may happen more often than motorists realize that that there's an exception. I think there's a couple of stations that I watch that are aggressively lowering prices and they are all by themselves. So I think the majority, like you said, if you're in the middle of Death Valley you have a captive audience and prices are more likely to be above average in that situation. But there are some holdouts in the country that I can say “This station is solo, but it's also bringing prices down in the majority of stations that surround miles away.”
Joe: (08:19)
And why would that be? What would be the reason why a gas station that doesn't have a lot of competition in its proximity may still be aggressive on pricing?
Patrick: (08:31)
They may wanna pull people in from a further distance away. You know, if you're a couple miles down the road and your station is not in the best location to pull traffic in. People that use the GasBuddy app may see that you have a low price, two miles down the road. And so some of those low prices can lure people in.
Joe: (08:50)
Economists must always be wanting your data because I could imagine there are a lot of interesting real world tests that can be seen from it about the degree to which transparency in pricing affects markets themselves. Because, you know, these days you're like, I will drive two miles down the road to get cheaper gasoline because the GasBuddy app says I could save 10 cents a gallon or something like that. But at one point in the past, consumers just didn't even have that knowledge. And so perhaps pricing discrepancies or divergence could persist longer.
Patrick: (09:31)
You know, there is a lot of market for this data potentially, you know, not only from, entities that want to watch this and better understand it, but stations may want to look at their own station data and compare it to their competition as well, to make sure they have an edge.
So I mean, there's a heavy market for this. I mean it's information and gas prices are so publicly priced. You can't escape them. I think there probably is a lot of interest from the consumer level to the business that wants to be as aggressive as possible. And they want to know that their price is the lowest. I think that's, if anything is true of a lot of stations, is they want to compete. They wanna have the lowest price and they wanna make sure their price is below the competition.
Joe: (10:16)
What about the question of margins? How much do gas stations make actually selling retail gasoline above wholesale typically? And then does it change much for gas stations that have significant ancillary businesses? Some gas stations are literally just like a guy in a tiny building and one pump. Whereas then you have others with lots of pumps, but then there's a food court inside the gas station and gifts, and other things like that. In which case, bringing people in maybe you lose money on the gas, but you can make a lot of money on selling drinks and stuff like that.
Patrick: (10:57)
Well, there's a perfect example. You mentioned food court. Some of the wholesale clubs that exist, they will take a much thinner margin that is, they'll make five or 10 cents a gallon instead of 20 cents a gallon, or even, you know, maybe 15 cents to get you to the location. Because what better way to get you to their store to buy 50 rolls of toilet paper or a 48 pack of your favorite drink, then to get you there with a low price?
So there is absolutely a difference in agenda and some stations will have a lower price to get you to their location, whether it's a wholesale club or one of these large format gas stations that are extremely popular, they'll have a whole slew of different food options. So price is a great way to get people to your location.
And then as you mentioned to go in the store where margins are higher, but those locations they'll still make some money. It may be 5, 10, 15 cents a gallon compared to the competition, which could be 20 to 30 cents. And now those margins, even at the big outlets will vary depending on what's going on. You talk about the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the wholesale price of oil and gasoline varying.
There will be times of a year, very brief times that a station could make an excessive 50 cents a gallon. Now that's not normal, right? That is extremely abnormal. I would say that over the course of the year, a well run station will average a margin of between 20 and 30 cents a gallon, which isn't a whole lot. And keep in mind when prices are higher, they're going to make less margin because those interchange fees, if you're using a credit or debit card, there's a cost to station owners that they, or often they don’t, or all the time, pass along to you. And that fee goes up as the price of gasoline has been higher.
Joe: (12:40)
Wait I hadn't even thought about that. So what happens, the higher the nominal price of gasoline they have to pay a higher check to the credit card companies?
Patrick: (12:51)
Exactly. It's very much like a commission. You know, if you sell a home, that's worth a million dollars, your commission of 2.5% percent is a heck of a lot more selling the million dollar home that is a hundred thousand dollars home. So as the price of gasoline goes up, those interchange fees charged by credit card companies are taking more of a bite out of a station's profit.
Joe: (13:11)
That's really interesting. I hadn't thought about that. So is it true empirically that we could see that the gas stations, if they're attached to something that sells more, whether it's a large format gas station, like a Buc-ees that people want to go into because they have clean bathrooms and food, or a Costco or a Walmart, well maybe they'll sell you a bunch toilet paper as well. Those kinds consistently have lower prices than a sort of small mom-and-pop or a place that sells nothing but gas.
Patrick: (13:44)
Exactly. Not only do they have the different agenda, keep their prices down, but they may have pricing power too. I mean, there's definitely an incentive for a refiner that's producing gasoline to make a deal with a big club, like a Costco or a Buc-ee’s because they're volume throughput, they can help that refinery sell through more of its gasoline. So those bigger stations, those bigger format stations sell more, they can have a lower price because the refinery may be more incentivized to make a better contract offer with them as an outlet to get rid of that fuel.
Joe: (14:16)
Would these be national contracts that a company like Walmart or Costco or Buc-ee's, which is, I guess, sort of regional, but some sort of contract, like a blanket contract that would affect all of their locations, or would it be a series of contracts with regional refiners?
Patrick: (14:34)
It can be both. It depends on the scope of the refinery. If that refinery has refineries in every region where the store has outlets, it could be in every market, but oftentimes that's not the case. You may not have a Shell refinery in the West Coast, but you may have a Shell refinery in Texas. So sometimes it may be localized to different regions, depending on what refineries operate in a given region.
Joe: (15:14)
I wanna get to more of the sort of refining question and the degree to which refining adds to the price of gasoline. But before we do, what is the most common price of gasoline right now? We're recording this on, August 16th, but what's the most common price of gasoline in America right now?
Patrick: (15:35)
Well, let's take a look here as, as I look, uh, we're at $3.49 is the most common price across the US. And they're all ending with the nine.
Joe: (15:44)
Why is that. Is it as obvious as it seems? That it's like, it looks better to say $3.99, than $4.00?
Patrick: (15:54)
It really is. I'd be hard pressed to find any station that ends in a zero because why end in $3.50, for example? Sounds a whole lot worse than 3 49. So everyone's gonna take the nine instead of the zero
Joe: (16:10)
And you never see a $4.01. Have you ever seen one?
Patrick: (16:14)
I mean, I've seen a $4.01. It always has me scratching my head. Like, why don't you stay at $4.03 and then make the jump to $3.99?
Joe: (16:22)
That's really funny. So that's all psychology. So how much of a broad regional difference is there in America, depending on whether, say, you're in Iowa versus somewhere in an expensive part California? I'm pretty sure gasoline is very expensive in Hawaii, where it all has to be shipped in. But how many price regions are there in the US?
Patrick: (16:48)
There's five and that's defined by an acronym PADD — Petroleum Administration for Defense District. And that goes back to WWII when we sliced the country into five pieces for strategic purposes. And to your point, each one of the regions has a different price based on the supply and demand balance in that region. And it's all defined by NYMEX — The New York Mercantile Exchange. They trade gasoline.
And then under that, every region trades at a different basis to what that one overlying market is, and that basis can be minus meaning a region could have a discount if they're well supplied. And if things are running well, some regions can have a premium or a surcharge based on if supply is extremely tight and every region right now, as I look at it between the highest and lowest, there is about a 50 cent gallon difference on gasoline.
If you include the West Coast, it's even more dramatic, a 75-cent gallon difference between the cheapest market, which is the Gulf Coast. And that's because there's a lot of refineries there, right? And there's a lot of supply. And the West Coast, which is the highest because of the opposite. There's not a lot of refineries. They have special blends of gasoline in California. So even there, you're gonna see a pretty wide gap between the nation's cheapest and most expensive, because even at the basis, there's a huge gap, a 75-cent gap between the lowest and the highest region.
Joe: (18:17)
So what is it in the Louisiana PADD right now? And what is it on the West Coast in terms of average prices?
Patrick: (18:24)
Well, you know, not taking into consideration tax or pipeline tariffs. So transportation distribution, the wholesale price in the Gulf Coast today is about $2.57 a gallon. Okay. Now, if you throw tax and tariffs on that's where you get a lot of these state's taxes right now, the statewide average is $3.42. So you're always gonna see a retail price that's quite a bit higher, cuz taxes usually slap on about 60 cents a gallon. But that’s $2.57 in the Gulf Coast.
In the San Francisco, the Northern California market — California's broken into Northern and Southern — the Northern California market, the same price of what fuel they use is $3.25 a gallon. So $2.57 in the cheapest community, the Gulf Coast, and $3.25 in the most expensive market, which is Northern California.
Joe: (19:10)
So the hierarchy of prices in the United States, you start with this NYMEX price, is that the RBOB future?
Patrick: (19:19)
That's exactly it. NYMEX RBOB is the foundation and everyone will trade at a premium or a discount to that NYMEX RBOB contract.
Joe: (19:29)
Okay. So here's another question. I am looking right now at the generic first month, NYMEX RBOB contract, ticker XB1 commodity on the terminal. Now the price is not quoted in per gallon. It says $2.90 is the current price. What is that? What is the basic volume unit of that contract? How how many gallons are there?
Patrick: (19:52)
I'm assuming you're looking at the front-month right now. I'm showing on my screen this September. Yeah looking at the specifications of that contract, you're talking about 42,000 gallons, which is a thousand barrels. That's kind of a basic contract. The CME, which is the Chicago Mercantile, they've done mini contracts. So you don't have to bet as much or buy as much, but that's the base contract is a thousand barrels of gasoline, which is 42,000 gallons.
Joe: (20:26)
Oh, I see. I'm looking at it. Now, I'm looking at the description of the contract. So there's 42,000 gallons and it looks like one contract value is actually $121,926 for one slug of gas. So the hierarchy goes, there's the NYMEX price. Then there’s the five PADD regions, in which there's usually some sort of basis above that. Although in theory, at times, if there's a lot of inventory in region, it can be below. And then that's determined by various pipelines and other costs and proximity to refineries. And then there are the state taxes.
Patrick: (21:02)
And there's one thing you left out and it's complicating factor. RBOB is reformulated gasoline. We call 'em kind of The BOBS. It's a family.
CBOB is conventional blend stock for oxygen at blending. That's what BOB means: blend stock for oxygen at blending, meaning that you have to add oxygen to it. Something like ethanol. We used to use MTBE, but something like that. And so you have RBOB = Reformulated. CBOB = Conventional. And out in California, so the California Air Resources Board has its own requirements. So out in California, it's CARBOB
Joe: (21:48)
CARBOB, I assume there's some sort of...
Patrick: (21:50)
Cleaner burning, that’s what regulates the BOBs is the RVP, the re-vapor pressure, which measures volatility of fuel, how easy that fuel — I should say the pressure of emissions from burning a gallon of fuel. So summer gasoline has lower RVP. That means the fuel doesn't give off as much emissions when it's burned. So it's less volatile. And because temperatures can interact with that in the summer months, you see ozone action days, right? Because the airborne temperature, the ambient temperature interacts with those emissions to create more ozone. And so lower RVP is important to clean the air up.
And depending on where you are, California has the most stringent requirements for RVP 5.99. Whereas some of the bigger cities use 7.0 PSI RVP. And some of the conventional gasoline for summer use is 9.0 pounds or PSI RVP. So the cleaner the gasoline the lower the RVP. And then when we move into winter, the standards go up to 13.5 and 15 is kind of the default RVP. So 15 PSI in the winter, nine PSI in the summer and the lower the RVP, the more you pay because the cleaner it burns, the components are cleaner, less volatile and costlier.
Joe: (23:15)
So I'm looking right now, again — I like this game of you describing something about gasoline and me trying to find a ticker for it and see if this makes sense. So I'm looking at a chart now on the terminal, it says LA 85.5 October CARBOB prompt different index. I think it's prompt. And right now it's 19 cents. So does that mean that if that sounds right, does that mean that there's a 19 cent premium for the California blend?
Patrick: (23:44)
Yeah. That's that you you're looking at the basis difference. So NYMEX right now is $2.90 if you're looking live and the basis difference for LA is 19 cents. So that would put the CARBPB price at $3.09 and that doesn't include tax. So you’re finding the basis.
That's the differentiator between whether your region is paying a premium or getting a discount to that New York Mercantile contract. And like I said, the West Coast is generally a very tight market. So it's rare to see a discount in the summer months in the West Coast. Whereas it's rare to see the Gulf Coast ever be at a premium because there's so many refineries down there that the market is generally well supplied. But if there is a major hurricane shutting those Gulf Coast refineries down, you can see a premium for Gulf Coast gasoline. And by the way, all these various foundations, these basis points that encourages refineries to send gasoline to these regions.
Joe: (24:43)
I was just gonna ask about that exact question. So to what degree can refineries shift the distribution of gasoline, depending on where there's a premium in a given region.
Patrick: (24:54)
Well, they can do that indiscriminately where pipelines exist. Now, the West Coast is essentially cut off from the rest of the country. Pipelines flow east to Las Vegas and west in the Phoenix. So there's a little bit of the disconnect. We always call the West Coast a petro island because what's produced there stays there and you can't easily bring material into the West Coast. It's probably faster for material to come from Japan or Singapore than it is from the Gulf Coast, going down to the Panama Canal than going up the East up to California coast.
The time it takes to load a ship in the Gulf Coast, go down through the Panama Canal and in mind the expense of sailing through the Panama Canal, because there’s an expensive toll and that may disadvantage your cost, but otherwise much of the rest of the country is well connected.
Gasoline from the Gulf Coast can run up the Colonial Pipeline to the East Coast and it ends New Jersey. So right now, the East Coast has been extremely tight. An example, the New York Harbor market is trading at a 14 cent premium to NYMX. Whereas the Gulf coast is trading at a 34 cent discount. That arbitrage opens the door for refineries in the Gulf Coast to send as much material into New York as they can because they get more money for it. But the space on the Colonial Pipeline is limited to the capacity. And right now it would not be surprising, given that pretty wide difference that that pipeline is fully allocated, meaning it's out of a room.
Joe: (26:28)
The Colonial Pipeline. That was the one that got hacked last year. What happened then? How did, uh, the distribution of gas move as a function of that pipeline? Having been shut down for a few days?
Patrick: (26:41)
Well it didn't really move. And that was the problem right now there's intermediate storage containers, right? At the big terminals, you see those white tanks above the ground that can hold hundreds of thousands, if not millions of gallons, of fuel. I think most of the problem from the Colonial was not actually the disruption and the flow of fuel, but how motorists responded in a panicked way to exacerbate the disruption of fuel supply.
People went out there. I mean we saw the photos, people with plastic shopping bags, filling up a plastic bag with gasoline. And so motorists overwhelmed even under normal times when there's not issues, they overwhelmed the system. I'm gonna throw out a percentage. I think of the outages that people experienced because the Colonial 95% of those outages were probably induced by how motorists responded. And 5% of the outages were probably because the stoppage of the pipeline. So it becomes down to human behavior, which exacerbated the situation, but we probably would've made it through there with limited disruptions, but once the beast was out there, in terms of once people thought that there was gonna be disruption, everyone ran for the pumps.
Joe: (28:03)
We just have couple more minutes, wanna wrap up, but, you know, refining capacity has been a really big macro topic. How much has the diminishment of refining capacity contributed to the price of gasoline. Lots of talk about early shutdown of refineries, especially during 2020, when there was this collapse in gasoline demand. How much do you think that's appreciated? And in your view, how much has the constraint of refining capacity contributed to the huge upward move that culminated in June?
Patrick: (28:43)
Well, I'd say a lot of it was due to maybe not necessarily, you know, the lack of refining capacity. Humans trade, right? All of the trades, you see, the way the market's moving is because humans are behind it trading based on the, the, the, the tangible value. And the problem is, is when you start to run out of capacity, it freaks the market out because obviously if, if supply or, or demand exceed supply, you know, prices are gonna be on a runaway. And, and, and so the market tends to be less measured in its response. When you start to see, you know, this, this, this territory where there's just an inability to keep up with the man, the market panics and prices start to escalate outta control because, you know, it's fear based. So people get outta control and, and the market goes up, up, up, up.
And and so having said that it's really important that we have spare capacity for both oil producers and refining, and by the way, that $150 barrel price in 2008, part of the reason why that happened is because we ran outta spare capacity. So the market just went out of control that overheated, which inherently caused Americans and the global economy to stop using as much. And then we finally got our spare capacity back, but this has been a story.
And again, it's happening now at the refinery level because of Covid and because the nation has been moving away to EVs, but I think that's a big reason why prices did get so outta control is because of the possibility that that supply was not going to keep up with demand, but we're gonna need more refinery capacity. The good news is it's coming online here in the next couple years.
Joe: (30:18)
Oh, that's good. All right. Final question. What is going on with demand levels right now? Because a lot of people are questioning this EIA data, which shows that somehow demand is below 2020 levels, which makes no sense. Cuz at that point there are still tons of people not going anywhere. What's going on with demand and what's going on with that data we're getting from the EIA?
Patrick: (30:41)
Well, and, and first of all, it's important to understand the methodology. Don't just look at the number. You have to dig into what the number represents. And for the EIA, it's the best number that they can get. They measure the pipelines, the tanks, the moving of products. So their metric is called implied demand or product suppled. You're, you're basically saying the market's consuming this much because we see this much moving through these tanks, but it's not the perfect gauge because stations have intermediate storage facilities, too, that are not measured by the EIA.
So stations could be sitting on more or less gasoline depending on the situation. Because there's intermediate storage devices that the EIA doesn't measure. So GasBuddy actually looks at demand at the retailer. And so our data doesn't line up with EIA because EIA could be flawed in that maybe prices are plummeting, stations are gonna say, “We're not gonna buy 10,000 gallons today. We're gonna buy 2000 gallons today.”
And then in three days, once prices are lower and the EIAs then would say, there's less demand because they don't see stations. Stations are slowing down their purchases to get ahead of pricing differences. Whereas our data continues to look at fuel dispensed at the retail station. So it's important to understand the EIA's methodology. There is inherent flaws. They just look at it differently.
Joe: (32:06)
Your data does not, your data shows robust demand.
Patrick: (32:09)
It shows healthy demand, certainly not at record levels. And now we're starting to see demand seasonally decline. But that's where we are. It's, it's not as weak as what the EIA has been suggesting recently.
Joe: (32:20)
Patrick DeHaan, I've been wanting to get 30 minutes of your time for a long time to learn all these rudimentary dumb questions about the price of gasoline. Like why is it different in one place?
Patrick: (32:33)
Hey, there's no dumb questions. And you know, this is my favorite thing to do. There's not a whole lot of solid answers out there. And, and there's a lot of curiosity and that's how I got into this too.
Joe: (32:42)
Well, really appreciate you coming on Odd Lots.
Patrick: (32:46)
My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Joe: (33:00)
Well, that was really fun talking to Patrick. I wish I could banter with Tracy for a few minutes, but I did find that really helpful because I'd always been really curious about things like, well, how much margin is there for a gas station? What are the advantages for a gas station that sells other stuff besides gasoline? What is the pricing power of the large chains of gasoline stations? Why is there such regional variation? So all of these questions, Patrick answered very well. Also that EIA thing that's been getting a lot of attention because people are looking at this falling price of gasoline and wondering if it's because the economy's falling off a cliff. Are people are driving less than they were in 2020. I don't think that's correct. Intuitively it's doesn't seem right. And as Patrick noted, the GasBuddy data does not show that kind of collapse at all. Although I guess we are past the peak of the summer driving season. So really fun talking to Patrick. And I guess we will leave it there.