thank you Obama...

You know, when Obama went on his European tour this past summer, gas prices fell to the lowest they had been all year. And when Obama was elected for president prices turned around and started to fall again. Well, I am here to report that they are still falling and maybe it is due to Hillary getting put into her new office as Secretary of State today.

There is some background story to how this worked out for me, regardless of that, nothing like this ever happened to me in all the time that Bush was in office.

I buy groceries at Safeway, a California grocery chain. Over the past couple of years they have offered a 10 cent discount off gas at their grocery stores that also sell gasoline. The discount is earned any time you purchased $50 in groceries. This always excited me during these times of extremely high gas prices.

One day I actually looked at the receipt from my purchase of a full tank of gasoline. At $4.50 a gallon, the 10 cent discount amounted to about $1.50 off. Whoop-di-doo, right? So I started to see that the Safeway ploy was really not that big of a deal.

Not until today. Last month they changed the discount gas program. No longer is it a $50 sale that gets you 10 cents off a gallon. Now you have to buy $100 worth of goods to get the discount. Thing is that it is not one sale amounting to $100 but cumulative sales that total $100. Every $100 you earn 10 cents off a gallon. That means when you've spent $200 cumulatively, you'll get 20 cents off a gallon, and so on.

Well, I stopped buying gas at the Safeway gas station because it is about a 5 mile drive from my house. I just started buying gas at my neighborhood stations, especially after the price of gas started to near, and go below $2.00 a gallon. But I have not stopped shopping at Safeway.

Color me surprised this afternoon when I realized I was nearly out of gas and the nearest gas station was a Safeway station. When I slid my Safeway Club Card in the pump it showed that I was going to get a 70 cent discount per gallon!!

My tank was virtually empty. The image below shows how much my total price for a full tank of gasoline cost. NO JOKE! And this is 2008! Not 1978!