I worked at a gas station on Macleod Trail during the Gulf War and the way gas prices were regulated on that street was with the Binocular Method.
Get out the binoculars and look down one way to the Shell station and see how much they were charging, then look to the other way to the Mohawk station and see what they were charging. If they were up, you went up. If they went down, you went down. The managers of those stations were doing the same thing. It was quite a dance. Sometimes we would blink first and crank up the price by 10cents and they'd quickly follow suit. Or maybe they wouldn't and we'd drop them again in a couple hours.
There was very little input from head office. Their advice was to do what we were doing.
It was a joke. World events weren't controlling the price of gas, the manager of Mohawk was.
|