Alex Tabarrok and his commenters are trying to figure out what's behind the distribution of the prices for regular, premium, and superpremium gasoline. I had a similar thread on this problem last year, and I still don't feel like I have a satisfactory answer. I will say that over the past year I've seen a lot more variation in the spacing of these prices than I ever noticed before.
The (unrelated) thing that's been irking me lately about the gas station: When I buy my gas from the computer in the pump (I no longer deal with human beings), it asks me if I want a receipt. I have two choices for my response: Yes, and No, thank you. IMHO there's just a teensy bit of passive aggression in these choices, as if I somehow can't be trusted to be polite to this machine on my own. Can't I please just say no?
The anthopomorphization of the computer had me tearing my hair out and swearing loudly into the phone (OK, I was screaming), when I spoke to Verizon about a DSL issue. You're forced to speak to a computer (no touchpad equivalents for many of the questions). I chose the option that indicated I was having trouble with my DSL connection (we had noise on the phones when the DSL was plugged in, even with a filter), and the computer came back and very sympathetically said "I'm sorry to hear that you're having problems with your dsl."
"NO YOU'RE NOT SORRY!! IF YOU WERE SORRY, YOU'D HAVE FIXED IT THE THEE TIMES BEFORE THAT I CALLED AND YOU'RE A DAMN COMPUTER!!! YOU HAVE NO G-D EMOTIONS, YOU HUNK OF..."
Man, that fake empathetic thing pisses me off.
That's hilarious.
For me though I have to say that I don't really even mind a polite/sycophantic machine. I just don't like the idea of a machine that expects me to be polite.
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