This week for holiday travel. Gas prices are at their highest levels in nine years, as Crispin Havener explains, Pennsylvania is bearing the brunt of the pain at the pump.
As we get ready to head over the river and through the woods to enjoy all the turkey and fixings you can stuff.
The sticker shock of gas prices is causing us drivers some indigestion. Americans are going to be feeling the pinch at the pump.
GasBuddy reports that nationally the price of gas is averaging $3.39 per gallon, well down a smidge from last week.
It’s the highest Thanksgiving week price since 2012 and nearly double the price we saw from the COVID related plummet 19 months ago. Add in our neck of the woods.
Those prices are even worse. GasBuddy shows Pennsylvania’s average is $3.60 per gallon, the highest cost east of the Rockies, no doubt fueled by Pennsylvania’s 58.7 cents per gallon gas tax, second highest in the country behind
California, where a gallon of gas is now averaging a staggering $4.73 per gallon.
But what the country in a different mindset with the pandemic this year, AAA still projects travel to be up 13% from last year’s Thanksgiving, with 90% of those travelers expected to hit the road.
“As we’ve always discovered, no matter how much gasoline prices are, people are still going to take that trip. They’ll just budget along the way.”
So when will relief come? Crude oil is taking a dove, hitting a six week low, with oil prices dropping 10%.
But world markets are still volatile, and relief when it comes won’t come quickly.
“Hard to catch back up and it’s going to take time. And unfortunately, we may not see sizable relief in the price of oil until 2022, ”
Meaning more money spent to get to dinner and perhaps less than the meal itself.
“Maybe they won’t be showing up at Thanksgiving. Dinner with a really big pie might be a smaller pie.”
Wishing you and yours a happy Thanksgiving. I’m Chrispin Havener.
