Gas bargain, or Big Oil chicanery?

Not to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but I have this nagging suspicion that the oil industry is playing us like cheap fiddles.

As gas prices have fallen recently, those news stories about our hostility toward Big Oil have all but disappeared. If anything, we’re more likely now to see stories that say how very happy we consumers are about paying only about $2.40 a gallon, a price that was making us sputter and fume at the pumps just a little more than a year ago.

Oh, yes, those oil people are clever, all right.

At the gas station the other day, where I made an absolute killing by filling my car with gas at $2.39 a gallon, I asked the clerk whether he had noticed a change in attitude recently among his customers. When gas was at $3 a gallon not long ago, he said, customers could be quite unpleasant when they had to pay up.

“Now, at these prices, I guess they feel like gas is a steal, like it’s on sale or something,” he said.

It’s the old bargain mentality at work. People who really like to shop will come home from a day at the mall, laden with bundles, and talk excitedly not about all the money they’ve just spent on things they didn’t need but about how much they saved by doing it.

It’s like that $300 fly rod I bought for only $100 a couple of years ago. I certainly didn’t need another fly rod at the time, but had I not bought the thing I would never have been able to save a whopping $200. A more logical person might fault my bargain-hunting approach, of course, but he would be missing the point entirely.

Besides, it is an awfully nice fly rod.

Come to think of it, gas station owners would be wise to start employing the same kind of sales tactics that department stores use. They could put up signs at the pumps, for instance, that say: “Was $3 a gallon. Now only $2.40. You save 60 cents!”

With that kind of come-on, people might just rush out to buy vehicles with even bigger gas tanks just so they could take better advantage of the extraordinary savings.

A story in USA Today back in May explained how easy it is to manipulate the average consumer by making him get used to record-high gas prices and to think of them as the new normal.

“People adapt to all states of affairs, positive and negative, and more quickly than you’d think,” said Nick Epley, a psychologist and assistant professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. “If gas were to go up from $2 a gallon to $3 overnight, we’d be up in arms. But it goes up a couple of cents each time you go to the pumps, and pretty soon it’s $3 and, ‘Yeah, that’s what gas costs.'”

And once that acceptance sinks in and we no longer feel the sting of high-priced gas, thoughts of cutting our consumption or trading in our gas hogs for more fuel-efficient cars tend to fall by the wayside.

“Conservation of any kind is tough for people to take,” Epley said. “It requires losing something, cutting out part of their lifestyles.”

Gas is bound to eventually creep back to $3 and probably beyond, of course, at which point we can all grumble about the greedy oil companies again. But in the meantime, I intend to keep filling up my car at these bargain-basement prices until I’ve saved enough money to buy a new reel for that nice rod I didn’t need but couldn’t afford to pass up.

As soon as it goes on sale, that is.