Tracking Costco gas prices

I worked at Costco while in college many years ago and I got to see how the gas price was set for my specific warehouse. Someone would drive out to a few neighboring gas stations, record prices, and set ours ~10 cents lower. That’s it. That’s how the price was set. Aside, working there was very good for a college job and I was treated very respectfully for the summers I was there.

GasBuddy is great for this. You can see average gas prices across all gas stations for a certain region (or nation-wide). https://www.gasbuddy.com/charts The data goes back even over 25 years if you play around with the query params (it started in June of 2000). E.g. https://charts.gasbuddy.com/ch.gaschart?Country=USA&Crude=f&...

> "a Global Fuel Crisis" Does anyone else find this hyperbolic? Gas prices here in the US are up about 26% from their recent-past price -- it stayed in a very narrow range of about $3.20 for a year or two, and now is at $4.05. A "FUEL CRISIS" is what you are seeing in Moscow right now. People lined up for miles and sometimes when you get to the front the delivery does not happen because the refinery got blown up. Or at least the 1970s oil crisis. A 26% bump in prices is a major annoyance, not a "crisis." I would guess that the person who wrote this headline has some kind of a political agenda. Did he describe it as a "fuel crisis" when gas prices rose from their previous ~2.80 baseline to the peak of $4.93 in June 2022, a 76% increase? Or was it not a crisis then for some reason?

Costco gas is famously a loss leader, typically running 15 to 20 cents below surrounding stations. Is this true? I always assumed that Costco just had better deals/longer horizon commitments so it could undercut local stations. Maybe they even own a refinery just to maintain the best margin.

Thanks for sharing, well done on reverse engineering the prices API. I live in Poland and did a similar project tracking fuel prices, however we don't have any data sources with reliable station pump price data, so I ended up tracking the trend and sending signals whether to wait or refuel now. I'm estimating prices based on brent barrel, usd rate, crack spread, wholesale prices (luckily we have local Orlen monopoly), some google maps crowd source data, scraping numbers from fuel station livestreams etc. I built a numeric model that gives 80-92% accuracy on price predictions in the horizon of 1-7 days. That was fun a project and ppl find it useful. Interestingly, my data analysis showed how significantly government decreased crack spread of Orlen before last parliament elections..