Gas Out? Why bother?

Don't participate in this "Gas out" nonsense. You will only be hurting people that have very little say in what the price of gas is. Even if you don't buy gas for a week, the only person you are going to hurt is the owner of the gas stations. I'm not entirely worried about people not buying gas, but if people weren't apathetic and things like this actually worked, only people who don't deserve to suffer would, in fact, suffer.  So...

From snopes.com

• "The premise behind all these messages is inherently flawed, because consumers' not buying gasoline on one particular day doesn't affect oil companies at all. The "gas out" scheme doesn't call upon people to use less gasoline, but simply to shift their date of purchase and buy gas a day earlier or later than they usually would. The very same amount of gasoline is sold either way, so oil companies don't lose any money."

By definition, a boycott involves the doing without of something, with the renunciation of the boycotted product held up as tangible proof to those who supply the commodity that consumers are prepared to do without it unless changes are made.

•  What the "gas out" calls for isn't consumers' swearing off using or buying gasoline, even for a short time, but simply shifting their purchases by a couple of days at most. Because the "gas out" doesn't call on consumers to make a sacrifice by actually giving up something, the threat it poses is a hollow one.

An effective protest would involve something like organizing people to forswear the use of their cars on specified days, an act that could effectively demonstrate the reality of the threat that if gasoline prices stayed high, American consumers were prepared to move to carpooling and public transportation for the long term.

• Simply changing the day one buys gas, however, imparts no such threat, because nothing is being done without.

Moreover, the primary potential effect of the type of boycott proposed in the "gas out" messages is to hurt those at the very end of the oil-to-gasoline chain: the independent service station operators, who have the least say in setting gasoline prices. (Independents are at the mercy of a very volatile oil market and operate on thin profit margins, and even a single day's disruption of supply or demand can wipe out many days' worth of hard-earned profits.)

As such, the "gas out" is a punch on the nose delivered to the wrong person.

So, stop calling for a gas out.