Moot point, as hardly any gas stations sell "just gas." At the very least, they'll sell cigarettes and soda and motor oil. But the idea that a gas station isn't manking money on gas is laughable except in extreme circumstances where location or tragedy comes into play. There are plenty of gas stations around me that sell little besides gas - no frou-frou convenience stores inside, no sandwich shoppes, just some soda mahcines and maybe a bucket of individually wrapped roses for 2 bucks per. Their prices for gas are comparable, give or take a nickel, to the cheapest gas stations around me. In fact, many of the "chic" gas stations, the ones charging 2 bucks for a cup for coffee, sell their gas for more (because you're paying for the convenience of one-stop shopping). If both the behemoth chain stations and the mom-and-pop few-frills stations are both still in business, selling their main product at a comparable price, I'm gonna take a wild bug-up-my-keister assumption* and say people who sell gas do all right by themselves, and the "we really don't make THAT much money" claim is offset by the fact they're selling thousands of gallons of gas a day, and even a few pennies per gallon adds up right quick, and they never like to admit that those "few pennies per gallon" can be more like 50 small pennies. I used to work for a gas station, albiet a gas DOCK for both commercial & pleasure boats. It was a municipal harbor, and the dock was owned by the town as well. They price-shopped and got the cheapest gas they could get, and to their credit, sold it at a lower rate than any of the other local docks. I had plenty of boaters tell me that they went out of their way to get our gas because it was the cheapest they could find, and the pleasure boaters based their boating on being around us when it was time to fill up. I was chummy with some of the receptionists - the ones who knew all the numbers, for fuel, for insurance, for maintenance, for labor, etc, and we were making a killing. Don't believe the poor-man's routine from the industry making record quaterly profits. And don't believe the "poorer-man's" shpiel from any mom-and-pop station owner, indie or franchise. If they're not making a decent living, something's wrong with their business acumen, NOT their product.
*yeah I know what happens when you assume, so we can dismiss that hoary old chestnut of a joke.
