Quote:
Originally Posted by Hakan
Nothing fell off the rails actually. The point of the original poster and other people like you has been that selling gas isn't that lucrative because the retailers aren't making money.
My point is that the above mentioned point doesn't matter. I am not swayed into thinking that the gas retailers are actually little guys and because of which, gas prices are reasonable. The fact of the matter is that the supply chain is what matters in selling gas. The market is, for the most part, uncompetitive due to high degrees of vertical integration between 4 or 5 firms. They reap the benefits and then try to cry poor because the little retailers aren't making money. The only thing the retailers aren't getting is their cut of the vertically integrated firm's pie. That's not an issue that I care about. It's an internal issue to BP, Shell and Exxon.
Nobody forced these retailers to buy franchises and focusing on their business model is a straw man to deflect attention to what's really going on.
Moreover, there is a certain myth of the small mom and pop gas franchise owner. Most of the franchises are owned by holding companies who themselves own multiple franchises.
So, I'll ask, where did I fall off the rails again?
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Your post summarizes quite nicely what falls off the rails, what you and Reggie and others do in every single post is confuse the gasoline retail business with the entire chain.
The retail end is highly competitive has little barrier to entry and is difficult to differentiate. Therefore there is no money in it.
Nobody here has said that large vertically integrated companies aren't making lots of money, in fact I think I have said it several times in this thread ... but retailers don't.
Large Integrated = Imperial
Retail = Joe the independant businessman.
I don't understand what you think is being deflected. The companies you reference make lots of money ... what's to deflect? But that fact is irrelevant to the topic.
For some reason you just can't differentiate between the two. I have tried to draw the picture as simply as I can over more than a dozen posts, to the point that I think a junior high student would understand ... I seriously don't know what else to tell you and the band of the naive.