Oh, sure, we’ve seen big declines in gas prices at the pumps in the last couple weeks. But that expense is still more than a bite-sized chunk of many people’s budget. Or, given that most people don’t live with a budget, should I say, their spending. It sure would be nice to reduce that total, wouldn’t it? So, seeking out that station with the lowest prices is time well spent.
Or is it? The OmniNerd has done a fine bit of statistical analysis on that question, and comparing whether the effort is better expended in looking for cost savings available from shopping for a subset of items at, in his example, large superstores (he calls them ‘pharmacy’, though that’s not the first thing that pops into my mind when I think of a place like Walmart or Target, but he also calls gas ‘petrol;’ soI’ll hazard a guess that the author is not American and let him use his own dialect 
) versus convenience stores. The math gets a bit heady at times, especially for someone who hasn’t done any true statistics work for more than a few years, but nothing that’s going to make you blow a circuit.
His conclusion: it takes far less effort to save the same money doing a little value shopping at the local superstore than going through the effort trying to track down the lowest price when you need to fill up. (And I’d add, wasting the gas doing any driving around finding that lowest price probably negates any savings you might have realized in the first place!) Not an exactly earth-shattering result to me, but it made for an interesting read…
[tags]statistics, gas, superstores, Walmart,Target,Omninerd[/tags]
