Quote: They aren't going to eat the cost of higher gas prices, they pass it on to the business that they are transporting for, who passes it onto the consumer. On a story about American Airlines yesterday on FoxNews, the head of American said that for every $1 a barrel increase in oil prices, they have $1billion higher operating expenses. Obviously they are using a whole lot of fuel, but the same logic transfers right over to the trucking/shipping/train industries too.
I work in the rail industry, and for every cent in increase in fuel, our operating costs increase $18 million dollars.
Granted, we pay considerably less than retail prices. In fact if I told you the wholesale price of our refined diesel fuel you'd probably [censored] your pants. Of course you get a pretty good discount when you're secondin the world only to the US Navy in fuel consumption.
We're still on track for a record year though, thanks for lots of overseas production movement. If only we could stop derailing so damn many trains this year.
