Gumby I can assure you that gas prices are often above $4.00 a gallon in Chicago near where I live as not many stations really close. Cook county which taxes gasoline extends over a large area around Chicago. I was quite excited to buy gas for less than $4.00 a gallon yesterday. When driving home passed a station near an express way entrance that seems to exist on mechanical work that is always around 50 cents higher than anywhere else.
Gas buddy searches for the lowest prices and for those of us who put on maybe 80 miles a month not worth going too far to get lowest prices or sit in line at Costco for 10 minutes or buy a new shiny Tesla : ) .
I did a search for top 10 gas stations and cheap fuel prices in Chicago on gas buddy.
top ten listings were for in Wisconsin, and Indiana outside of cook county. Those were in $3.25 a gallon range or so.
Cook county tax is 0.665 cents per gallon and it is possible there can be local city taxes of .003.
Per illinoispolicy.org Illinois is #2 in nation for gas tax.
I do admit that when i went to eia.gov the weekly formulated gas prices they show a chart that says as of week 03/25/2024 were 3.968 dollars per gallon. I'm probably not as aware of gas prices as others as I have a small tank and fill up when down 3/8 th.
I don't doubt that gas prices are over $4.00 some places in the country. Hawaii, Alaska, and California immediately come to mind, because they are always higher than the rest of the country due to a variety of factors. And, based on your post, this list apparently includes Cook County due to taxes. But that is
not an example of inflation experienced by a guy who lives in downstate Illinois. Neither is the reported $4.00 in Schaumburg. To see if gas prices were inflating, you'd have to know how much that station in Schaumburg (or Hawaii, Alaska, or California) was charging two weeks ago or a month ago. Maybe it was even higher then.**
I don't know why someone would bother to post that gas is over $4.00 per gallon, with a "yikes" no less, when they are not paying that much. Yes, one can scrape up examples of some places around the country of gas over $4, but when easily available public data shows that is not the general case where the poster actually lives, it makes me suspect the motivations behind the post.
And, in a larger sense, this is why anecdotes are such a poor way to measure inflation. The BLS has a considered methodology to ensure that they are measuring apples to apples. You can disagree with their methodology and the adjustments they make, but they use actual published data, not secondhand reports, and they make an effort to measure the exact same things, in the exact same places, under the exact same conditions and over the precise time they are measuring. That cannot be said of almost any of the anecdotes reported in this thread. So you'll excuse me if I take the word of the BLS as to the current level of general inflation in the national economy over the reports of individuals.
**Edit to add - this site is useful for comparing gas prices across the country and over time. You can see the average price for each county in your state and compare that to the national average and the price in other states.
https://gasprices.aaa.com/?state=IL
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