There are some street corners in big cities in which each one of those corners, actually has a gas station upon it. One would think, that in a situation in which the competition is literally a stone's throw away, that at least one of those gas stations would have a meaningfully lower price than the others, so as to put pressure of those other gas stations to compete at that level, as well as to differentiate themselves from those other gas stations, so as to increase their volume of business over their competitors. The fact of the matter though, is that the typical baseline price of gasoline within a particular county in a particular State, in which all of the respective gas stations are subject to the exact same governmental taxes, demonstrates more often than not, a small disparity in gasoline prices. That is to say, the highest price in the neighborhood is typically less than 10% more than that baseline price, and the lowest price is no more than 10% less. While, that is a difference in price to the consumer, that difference in consideration of the importance of that commodity and the expense, thereof, is relatively light.
What doesn't make a lot of sense, is that oil is produced by several gargantuan oil companies, such as ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron, BP, and the like, of which the oil fields that they extract their oil from are going to have accompanying costs that are quite obviously going to vary from not only field to field, but from company to company. In other words, the cost to extract oil for ExxonMobil as compared to Shell is going to be noticeably different, and certainly should never be about the same, because some oil fields are far more productive at a far lower cost than others, and that materially matters. So that, logically those companies that extract oil at a lower internal cost should be able to sell their oil at a lower cost point, of which those retail gas stations, that buy that cheaper oil, should thereby be able to pass on some of those savings to the consumer, and by their consistently lower gas prices, take market share away from their competitors.
However, instead, we live within a construct in which barrels of oil, no matter the internal costs to extract the oil, actually are sold by the manufacturers of that oil by the barrel through commodity markets, so that the low-cost producers, as well as the higher-cost producers are basically selling their oil for the same price, and the retailers that thereby buy that refined gasoline through that market, are in essence, paying about the same price for that refined gasoline, which thereby necessitates, more or less, that the prices that the consumer thereby pays, is going to be about the same, subject to different country taxes in different States, as well as the fact that some States have higher gasoline taxes than others, in which the end result is that the consumer of that gasoline, in the area in which they live, basically pays about the same price for a gallon of gasoline no matter what gas station that they do their business at.
All of the above, basically signifies, that though gas stations do ostensibly compete against one another, they are in many ways and forms, similar enough in their pricing, that for all intents and purposes, they act as if they are nationalized, though they are not.