California Gas Station Accidentally Sells Gas at 69 Cents per Gallon
Here’s a fun story to combat the Monday blues. A gas station in Rancho Cordova, California made a lot of motorists happy last Friday by selling fuel at 69 cents per gallon.
This wasn’t some sort of promotional stunt or anything like that. Rather, a misplaced decimal point is to blame for the error. The actual price that should have been entered into the system was $6.99 (the average price of gas in California is currently $6.34 per gallon). In other words, customers got 90 percent off.
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As you’d expect, long lines of cars and trucks quickly jammed the gas station, with the news spreading across social media. Some people even came back a second and a third time with different vehicles. Many also brought their gas cans to fill up at the same time.
The gas station manager noticed the pricing error after about three hours, leaving quite a bit of time for drivers to seize this too-good-to-be-true opportunity. Amazingly, a similar thing happened in Tennessee earlier this spring when a gas station over there sold fuel at 45 cents per gallon. At the current exchange rate, that represents 15 cents CAD per litre!
Now, the bad news: Goldman-Sachs is forecasting Brent crude oil prices will average $140 a barrel between July and September, up from about $120 a barrel at the moment. With bottlenecks at refineries, prices at the pump will rise to levels normally associated with $160 a barrel this summer, the Wall Street bank warns.
In Canada, gas prices are the highest in British Columbia at $2.26 per litre right now. Newfoundland-and-Labrador ($2.22/L) and Quebec ($2.20/L) are next. Alberta has the cheapest gas at $1.84/L.