Sucker!

"here little guy, you can get some free money! just buy some of our stock and when we steal from you all, you'll feel great because some other poor stock market sucker will pay you free money!"

Get-something-for-nothing is how con artists hook their marks. The stock market is a obfuscated and distributed version of the old shell game.

Also, your state probably has a law or two in place that prevents local station owners from selling oil at too low a price. Those laws aren't set at the behest of big greedy oil companies (who already have their money even before it's sold to you). It'd be interesting to find out who likes those laws, don't you think? I'd start with the state government that gets a huge amount of tax revenue from gasoline sales.

fiskhus jim – You're making stuff up now. Arrgue the actual point, please.

Or do you advocate organized crime, theft and extortion as valid ways of doing "bidness"?

You def can't help me. You don't get it by a long shot. Multinational petro-chemical companies have a mutually beneficial relationship with world governments. The "government" sets oil gas lease rates, keeps "strategic" oil reserves, meddles in pipeline rights, currency, international lending gaurantees, shipping, futures trading and even in negotiations with anti-capitalist oil cartels and on and on. All these things have impact on petroleum futures trading levels and the government entities that take these actions invariably have oil executives or their proxies right at their elbows when they act.

Big oil is plain and simply statist. The owners feign interest in total deregulation, but get fat off niches and market inefficiencies that their friends in government forge for them.

Your little "free markets are the best" stroke fest is humorous.

Near my house, near the interstate at the high volume stations, gas was $2.26 this weekend, 50 miles back into the mountains in a small town, the price at the two little low volume stations competing for the morning coffee commuter market were selling gas for $2.15. Both areas are served by the same wholesale fuel dealers so on any given day they pay the same to fill their tanks. They must consider their costs, and they set prices to maximize profit, and prices can vary a small amount as seen here but their costs and competition's prices are closeley correlated to their sell price. That's the free market at work.

The way Exxon Mobil sets wholesale prices is a wholly different matter. Although for much of their product they own it though it's entire journey from oil well to refinery to gas pump, futures markets, not their actual costs and the end user markets elastic limits , have the biggest influence on prices. The fix is in.

You may be correct in scolding folks that whining for companies to give back windfall profits is stupidity – it is. To wax poetic that this is the free market working at it's best shows you simply want to make the super sucessful oil executives and political operatives who are plainly gaming the system seem virtuous. They are cheaters. You are carrying their water without compensation.

And, just so you know, corporations do not perform for the public welfare. They perform for the benefit of their owners, the stockholders. That's how it's done in soccessful economies.