[Cowboy89]

There are 12 different companies that own refineries in Canada and numerous more retailers of gas as well. The thing though is that they are selling the exact same product that gets posted on the outside of their store allowing for competitors to see and match price. All it takes is one company to lower their prices by 5 cents a litre before everyone else within reasonable driving distance lower's their prices too. It's a real effort to price shop for other goods and services and those 'different prices' are actually differing levels of prices above and beyond the lowest competitive price. So you would be happy if Shell charged $1.50/litre, while Esso Charged $1.75/litre, and Petro-Canada charged $1.20/litre while Husky charged $1.16/litre but none of them showed you the price until you got into the store?

I'd argue that gas prices are 80 times more transparent than any of the other goods and services you buy. Due to that the competitors are in tune with other's prices and generally don't have the ability to charge more than the guy across the street.