DiggerJim said:
jtb51b said:
DiggerJim said:
How about this? Your dealer may have filled his tanks for $3.50/gallong a month or so ago. Except his tanks have 100,000 gallons in them. How long do you think it'll take him to get rid of that $3.50/gal oil delivering 100 gallons at a time? Or do you think he should mark it down to $2.50 and lose a hundred thousand dollars?
Absolutely.. Either that, or eat the whole tank and go out of business.. This is the real world, those gas stations that had 3$ a gallon gas that ran the price up to 4.50 recently as a result of a hurricane were allowed to do so because its a FREE market. That oil guy needs to use some of the profits he procured earlier to keep himself a float until he can make a profit again... If they can win big, they can lose big-- give it a minute the government will bail them out too..
Jason
ROTFLMAO
! Your charity is astounding. That oil dealer is our neighbor. He's not some "bigwig fat cat" in some far away city. Local oil dealers are just like the corner grocer, the service station owner down the street, etc. The nickel or dime a gallon they've made in profits aren't going to cover the oil they bought to supply their customers. They've never gotten wealthy off of the products & services they sell. The bailouts will be given to the large corporations and the individuals who bought too much house on too little income and now can cry about getting taken advantage of. The local oil dealer is likely simply to go out of business costing him his business and many of our neighbors their jobs.
I hope that you get to see just who that is when it happens...or maybe you lose your job, need some help and someone decides you had your chance to make plenty of money in the good times so if you can't take some of the money you made over the past few years of great prosperity to keep yourself afloat until you can find a job and feed the family again too bad for you. If you can earn a nice living then you can lose a nice living...but give it a minute and see if the government will bail you out too. (Or considering where you live, why aren't you better prepared for that hurricane so you've got a few hundred or thousand gallons of gas to tide you over after the hurricane comes thru...why do you need someone to sell you cheap gas or help dry your town or fix the buildings or subsidize your insurance? Why should it be my taxes that pay for your desire to live in a hurricane prone area? After all, I don't get hurricanes and I don't ask the govt for a handout everytime a snowstorm comes thru--what's wrong with you people?)
My grandfather had some words of wisdom that apply now --
A recession is when your neighbor loses his job. A depression is when you lose yours. Tolerance and charity are called for now, not kneejerk uninformed self-satisfied petty vengance. I expect this doesn't mean much to you based on where you're from (most home heating oil is used in the Northeast) so you don't really know how the business works, but for any of the folks up here, your comments might provide an opportunity to reflect on what kind of sympathy we're going to get from the rest of the country.
Digger, I agree that we should not be bailing out companies that fail because of horribly bad business decisions. I also agree that it is insane to be constantly bailing out coastal residents that make a choice to live in hurricane prone areas. Furthern to this point...I also understand that
any business runs the risk of going out of business for any number of reasons. Not to sound too cold, but this has always been the case in our economy. The oil, gas, and propane industries are simply starting to see what other businesses have seen throughout history...Competition! For decades there have not been many choices for a lot of folks when it came to heating their homes, or fueling their cars. If you lived in an urban setting for instance you did not have cost effective access to cord wood, so you had to rely on oil or gas to heat your home. With improvements tho distribution channels, we now have access to many alternatives to oil and gas...such as pellets, solar, geo-thermal, etc. In our cars, we now have the ability to drive a hybrid that gets double or triple the mileage of gas only cars. This is called "market evolution".
I don't know any people that hate the good folks that own fuel oil dealerships. This is not personal, it is simply the free market economy at work. For instance, I buy my propane from a dealer in Milford, NH that began selling pellet stoves and pellets last year. He chose to change his business model with the times so that rather than be put out of business by alternative fuels, he can now be a part of a growing market segment. As a more personal example, I am in the insurance business. As you can read daily, the insurance business is in serious trouble. Almost all of it is self-inflicted. Some of the larger insurance companies refused to change their interanl risk management systems to avoid putting their comapnies at risk. Now, they are seeing the consequences of their in-action. At the end of the day, their failure to evolve with the times is resulting in many of them closing their doors, or getting in line for some corporate welfare. The reality is that not all insurance companies are seeing the same results, because some of them made good business decisons to change.
I don't know you, but I certainly respect your pellet stove knowledge based on the posts I read from you. Maybe you or someone close to you is a fuel oil dealer, I don't know. If this is the case, I sincerely hope that they are not adversly effected, but in the end...that will be up to them. The great thing about this country is that it gives evrerybody the ability to work hard and start a business...but, it does not guarantee that they will succeed or sustain...only they can do that. Remember, the guy who made Ice Boxes loved his company, but then another guy came out with an electric refridgerator and the game changed.
Thanks for your posts. I may not agree with all of them, but I respect your opinions and enjoy reading them.
