Awash In Profits, Exxon Extracting Every Penny From Its Franchisees

Washington Post:

Every time Sohaila Rezazadeh rings up a sale at her Exxon station on Chain Bridge Road in Oakton, her cash register sends the information to Exxon Mobil's central computers. If she raises the price of gasoline a couple of pennies, chances are that Exxon will raise the wholesale price she pays by the same amount.

Through a password-protected Web portal, Exxon notifies Rezazadeh of wholesale price changes daily. That way the oil giant, which is earning about $3.3 billion a month, fine-tunes the pump prices at the franchise Rezazadeh has owned for 12 years.

Now, however, Rezazadeh says she cannot stay in business. Credit-card fees are eating her profit margins. Exxon, which owns the station land, last week handed Rezazadeh a new lease raising her rent about 30 percent over the next three years. She stuck a copy on the window of her station to show customers who are angry about soaring pump prices. Rezazadeh has told Exxon that she cannot make money with the rent that high. Her territory manager's reply, she said, was simple: When you go, leave us the keys.

Read the whole story: Washington Post

Comments

[ibsteve2u]

You read a (another) (in a long, long list of) story like this, and you think...ge­e, wouldn't Ralph Nader make a great U.S. Attorney General?

[americanwhocares]

Big Oil Executives should be serving jail time right now. They are liars and are gouging and cheating everyone they can. The gravy train will end in January 09 with Obama. These amoral clowns know it, so they are now retain high priced lawyers to protect themselves with the prosecutions start. Cannot wait, to see these clowns with stripes on their clothes. (and not caviar and filet mignon on the menu)

[racetoinfinity]

Must-read: Investigative reporter Greg Palast's expose of an even deeper layer of war profiteering by Big Oil in Iraq - continuing a practice that's been going on for almost a century - choking off Iraq's oil to cut supply and boost prices astronomically - please read this new eye-opening new post by Greg Palast -

http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/obamas-secret-war-profiteering-tax

[CaptainHowdy]

I think this was very, VERY obvious.

[racetoinfinity]

Probably so (although the conventional anti-war wisdom was that they wanted to get their hands on the oil so they could sell it). (I, personally, am just discovering the truth about Middle East/U.S./­British oil history in the Middle East for the last hundred years). In any case, here we are this Memorial Day Weekend, and not a peep about any of this from the corporate-owned MSM; they stay at/with the amber/orange (see Ken Wilber) mythic/patriotic level myth that we are in Iraq to promote liberty, not profits for a tiny elite, while ruining thousands of American and millions of Iraqi lives (and the life of Gaia).

[trollsbwild]

Sure, there is no price gouging going on.
Move on. No story here.

[mergina]

Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could get every American to not buy a single gallon of gas indefinitely? Not fly on a plane. To me the problem is not so much the higher price of the stuff, it is the glut of waste all around us. People choosing gas guzzling status pieces of crap just drinking the stuff. Take this weekend for instance. Just look at how little this $$$gas crisis has altered everyones Memorial Day Weekend Plans. I do not have much faith in this country changing its pitiful consumption and pollution anytime in the near future, and that is a huge problem.

[sparkandy]

Slightly off topic, but here's a goofy one as far as oil goes. The City of Tulsa sits on a substantial pool of oil, but because it's an urban area drilling is prohibited. Now, all of a sudden with the price of oil so high, the city has decided to investigate drilling IN THE CITY. Then they'll use the profits from the oil to fix the infrastructure. I just hope MY house sits on top of a big pool. They then can put an oil well in my yard and maybe I can fix MY infrastructure.

[Krikkit]

Exxon is heartless. Just after Katrina I was on my way in to work and listening to NPR interview an Exxon Executive. The guy said, "We want to do our part to help out the victims of Katrina. That's why we pay our taxes."

That's why we pay our taxes? The rest of us pay our taxes because we'd go to JAIL if we didn't, but Exxon pays them out of the goodness of their hearts and to help Katrina vicitms. Oh, and by the way, they began their march to the current price of $4.00 on the backs of those same Katrina victims. I guess it was so they could pay more taxes. NOT.

[Abroad]

I don't know exactly the terms of these franchise contracts but it sure looks like the closest thing you can get to racketeering.

Basically the franchise "owner" (it's slavery more than anything else) supports all the risks while the home company guaranties its margins.

Even worse, if a franchise owner decides to lower gas prices for a while (even if it means losing money) in order to attract customers to other services he offers, the oil company will cut off supply! (I saw a case like that in LA)

The more I look at it the more it seems to me that completely unregulated capitalism is the worst enemy of free enterprise because the wealthiest can always impose his will.

[MajorKong]

True. The only thing worse than a regulated monopoly is an unregulated monopoly.

[atomic]

This is because the oil companies know we have reached peak oil and we are now in a global decline ... the past 20 years have all been about oil .... the wars etc. Now it's here and a world wide economic collapse is about to happen ... worse than any time in history and nobody except the shadow elite is prepared ...

These elite bankers and oil families have built underground compounds .. there will be mass hysteria and death... famine and disease... they have planned for this for quite sometime ... all this my sound hard to believe now but in the near future it will come to pass and there is nothing we can do to stop it ... all you can do is get ready to protect yourself and your family as best we can against each other and against the viruses they plan to release into the general populations.

Then you will know the shadow elite did this to us ... the Rothschilds and others. That's who I will be looking for when our civilization implodes. The murderers .. the one's responsible.

[AnnArky]

Like someone earlier already said: You want gas prices to come down? Then turn off your cell phones and TV's for one week. Prices will come down so fast you'll think you're living in the 80's.

Anyone interested?

[Krikkit]

I haven't turned on my TV in six years. I'm ALREADY on board waiting for the rest of you to join me.

[CaptainHowdy]

I shut my cable off months ago and watch DVDs that I've ripped to a laptop hooked up to my TV. It's great. I only watch what I like. There are also tons of public domain movies available at archive.org if you prefer older classics, like I do.

[RoseMerry]

There is just no end to megacorprate greed. Based on greed, capitalism is doomed to succeed as long as it is allow to exploit, rape, and plunder.

Exxon cannot even throw a few bones to it's retailers! Shame!

Could it be they know that the volume of sales are going down, now that the oil has peaked, and they need to get rid of some retailer outlets. This way, they drive some out.

Evil. Pure, hideous evil. I would nationalize all American oil operations in a minute, then pay off the debt and finance health care for all.

[StillAmused]

(once more, with feeling))

"Perhaps 60% of today"s oil price is pure speculation"

by F. William Engdahl
Global Research, May 2, 2008

"... given the unchanged equilibrium in global oil supply and demand over recent months amid the explosive rise in oil futures prices traded on Nymex and ICE exchanges in New York and London it is more likely that as much as 60% of the today oil price is pure speculation. No one knows officially except the tiny handful of energy trading banks in New York and London and they certainly aren"t talking."

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8878

and:

"OPEC member Iran is storing about 25 million barrels of heavy crude oil in tankers in the Persian Gulf. The country expects to move the stored crude by the end of the second quarter or early in the third quarter, an official from the National Iranian Oil Co. said Wednesday.

"In other words, there is so little demand that they have completely used up their on shore storage capacity and don't expect to clear this inventory until October. Clearly it is time for Senator Byron Dorgan's Bill to raise commodity margin requirements. All of this talk from our President and others about third world growth being responsible for dramatically higher commodity prices is nonsense."

http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/05/14/speculation_oil_prices/

[Krikkit]

I'd say it's higher than that.

Ironically, I heard an economist say that the oil prices and the sub-prime lending failure both have the same root cause, and that is Bush's tax cuts to the wealthiest 1%.

Here's why: You lower taxes on the wealthy and that frees up a whole lot of capital. That capital is invested -- because it's what their accountants do. They look around for the highest return on investment on the buck, and where is that? In the riskiest investments. High risks equals high returns for those with enough cushion to absorb a blow if they fail.

So cash gets pumped into the futures market and into institutuions springing up to lend to the riskiest investors, driving up the cost of oil per barrel, and driving down the barriers to investing in morgages.

Deregulation and giving tax breaks to the wealthiest led directly to the problems we face today. That's why the neocons have lost all credibility in the economic arena. Their lassez faire economic policy is an utter sham.

[StillAmused]

Like their neocon war-criminal heroes, Junior and Darth, they're busy jamming every penny they can steal into tractor-trailers before January, when they have to turn this shell of a democracy back over to its hapless citizens.

[jukesgrrl]

Just like Putin, their pal whose "heart" they could see into.

[researcher]

americans want degregulated capitalism so let it be and quit whining.

we all know everything americans is best in the world.

whoops you mean the dollar is not worth one euro?

no way everything american has to be best god deemed this to be so.

enjoy your capitalism americans and keep confusing it with democracy.

the have mores love it that most americans dont know the difference between capitalism and democracy. they smile all the way to the bank. you dont like it buy oil stocks and hope mc war wins in nov.

go mc war and bomb bomb iran. truly one great american hero and deserves to earn the respect of his father and grandfather.

so what we have another war americans love war ask mc wars pastors. sorry x pastors for now.

[Krikkit]

American's GOT deregulated capitalism and this is what it led to. Ask any American if they want to pay more and more and more for gas, and I think you hear a resounding "NO!" however. Ask them if they want to see repeats of the mortgage crisis, I think you'll see the same thing.

But of course, since you are only interested in flag words "deregulation" rather than learning how the economy actually works, you won't see the connection­s...

[Graywolf48]

Isn't the mortgage crises another product of deregulation? As are rising cable television prices? Or increasing utility prices? How about the ever rising credit card interest rates, no regulation there and no longer any tax deduction. The Republicon war cry is deregulation will lead to more competition and lower prices for the consumer. Please give me examples of just where this has been the case. Perhaps, since oil/gas is so vital to our nation's economic health and our over all security, we should consider nationalizing the industry? That's talk that will make Exxon and friends shiver a little. Or how about regulating the industry altogether and not permitting these excessive profits? Right now we're in a capitalistic free for all, no controls on excesses. When will American's have enough of this era brought on by Reagan and his goons of greed beig good? I think a little revolution now and again might be a good thing. Don't you?

[CAPTAINSKIPPY]

Ultimately, bad government is bad for all of us. Republicans and big business have had long, cozy relationships. While it's true we need to be making good laws about corporate political contributions, and corporations as our servants, (not to mention good labor laws for our citizens as employees), does anyone here believe big corporations are charities? When fuel prices rise quickly, it's easy to blame Exxon and other fuel firms - for acting like corporations!! Our pension funds often own shares in many of the big corporations, and hopefully will fund our retirements in part. Remember Exxon is a publicly held company, not a closed private firm. But more important, don't forget that the oily chimp & his buddy Dick Cheney, in our names, are using global petro resources to run "Operation Iraqi Liberation" (later modified to adjust the annoying acronym). But earlier, the globalist capitalists moved our factories to China and elsewhere giving those countries the means to demand more resources for their new factories, and the necessary infrastructure. Net message: We still need impeachments. Then a fresh start once gWb is out.