Thanksgiving will be here in 10 days. You can count it up. That means you have to do your laundry, get someone to stop by and feed the cat, pack your suitcases and, if you’re driving, fight the traffic to get from here to there.
The stress will still be present; Thanksgiving traffic can be, well, challenging.
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But the good news: It won’t be as expensive to get there this year as it was a year ago or in 2022. This assumes you’re driving a traditional vehicle with an internal combustion engine.
In fact, retail gas prices are at their lowest levels since spring 2001. Great for consumers, not so great for oil-and-gas producers.
The odds are the national price will drop below $3 a gallon maybe by Thanksgiving or soon afterward.
AAA said the national average price of gasoline was $3.071 a gallon on Monday, down a penny from Sunday and down 1.34% for the year. AAA’s price measure peaked at $3.679 a gallon on April 19 and has been falling ever since.
GasBuddy came up with $3.03 a gallon as of Sunday.
Let’s put price into real context. Let’s say you’re traveling from Buffalo, N.Y., to Albany, roughly 300 miles. You drive a Honda CRV that gets maybe 25 miles to the gallon. You need 12 gallons of gas to arrive at your destination.
A year ago the fillup might have cost $3.617 per gallon one way, or $43.40.
This year, the price of fuel is $3.145. The cost of your fillup will be $37.74, a savings of 7.2%. In 2022, the year retail gasoline prices topped $5 a gallon, it was still around $4 at Thanksgiving. So the drain on a bank account would be noticeable. The drain on a bank now is much smaller.
The cost of your fillup is about 7.2% cheaper than it was a year ago.
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It should be noted that average prices in 22 states are already under $3 a gallon.
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Why have gas prices come down? Six reasons:
Crude oil at $120 barrel in early 2022 couldn’t be sustained as the global economy started to recover from the Covid-19 pandemic.Gasoline prices are cyclical, usually rising in the spring and summer as people travel more and sliding back in the fall and early winter.Global demand for oil eased because economies in China and elsewhere have been relatively weak.Members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries repeatedly produce more crude than their production quotas allow.Lastly, the Middle East has not dissolved into all-out war. At least not yet.
All things to be grateful for.
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