I was pumping gas into my car on the corner of Colorado Boulevard and East Colfax Avenue when the guy across from me spoke.
“Man, this is a relief,” he said, as the dollar meter on my pump spun like a drunken figure skater. “It’s good to see the price back down. When gas was going at $4 a gallon I didn’t know if I could hack it.”
His name was Tom Richards and he sounded genuinely relieved about paying a mere $52 to fill his Ford F-150 pickup. Gas prices across Denver dropped to $3.49 this week, down more than 50 cents from the summer peak.
As the snail said when he rode on the back of the turtle, “Wheee.”
I’m as happy as the next slave to the internal combustion engine about the nominal downturn at the pump, but I am not turning cartwheels.
I remember when gas jumped to $3.49 a gallon back in the spring and how outraged everyone was then.
But that’s the insidious thing about fuel-price increases, something we have witnessed since OPEC’s oil embargo of the early 1970s.
Remember how the idea of $2.59-a-gallon gas once seemed unthinkable, an event that would make us storm the castle, torches and hay rakes in hand like so many outraged villagers in a horror movie?
Now we look back at $2.59 gas like the good old days.
Think of it as “misery creep.” It’s the incremental uptick of what we’re tolerating. Say you have a splitting, five-alarm headache and take a couple of aspirin. Thirty minutes later, you’re happy to have just a dull throb, when on any other day said throb would drive you crazy.
Richards’ comment made me curious. I walked over to the next island — this was Thursday — and asked someone else his opinion about the price downturn.
Michael Sanchez was pumping gas into a Buick Skylark that had seen better days, though in truth most Buick Skylarks had seen better days the minute they rolled off the assembly line.
“I can live with $3.49 gas, I guess,” Sanchez said. “That $4 was hurting me.”
“But weren’t you outraged when gas hit $3.49?” I asked. “Shouldn’t you still be?”
Sanchez thought a moment.
“I guess I should be, but $3.49 is still a relief,” he said.
Sanchez climbed into his car and drove off. I was gratified that his week was going so well.
I had business across town and mulled the notion of “misery creep” throughout the drive. Finally, I couldn’t stand it anymore and pulled into a Sinclair station at South Monaco Parkway and East Yale Avenue.
And mercifully, I found Carly Moser. The 25-year-old was gassing up her Volkswagen Jetta. I asked her whether she was heartened by $3.49 gasoline. She was having none of it. No misery creep for her.
“It’s not a big relief when in 1999 it was a dollar,” Moser said. “If it drops another 20 cents, yeah, it’ll make a difference, but it’ll be right back up.
“I don’t see $3.49-a-gallon gas as anything to be happy about at all.”
Moser is a banker. Given recent events on Wall Street, I’d say she comes by her pessimism honestly. Bravo.
She shook her head and returned the nozzle to its cradle.
“In the long run this might be a good thing,” Moser said. “It’ll make people think about alternative methods of fuel.”
I hope so. I also hope the pinch of gas prices makes people think, period.
William Porter’s column runs Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at 303-954-1977 or wporter@denverpost.com.
