[cross-posted at
Reality.Hole]
I just wrote this email to Kroger's head offices via the contact page on their website:
I was absolutely shocked driving home today as I passed two Kroger stores featuring regular unleaded gasoline prices of $3.31 per gallon. Across the street from one is a Shell station (generally one of the higher-priced gas retailers) with gas at $2.89, almost fifty cents per gallon difference.
If I were buy gas from you instead of the Shell station across the road, it would cost me an additional $8 to fill up my tank.
I don't know what you call such a brazen and shameless disparity, but I know what I call it: freaking price gouging. And I believe the Texas Attorney General's office just might have a similar opinion after I lodge a complaint against you with them.
More below the fold
For many years, I have shopped at Kroger at least once a week; in fact I spent $72 at your West Road and Jones Road store just last Sunday. I'd estimate that I spend an average of $125 a month at Kroger.
That stops now. Due to your unconscionable gas price hikes, Kroger has now lost my business forever. With medical advances, I expect to live at least another 40 years. If the price of nothing you sell increases in my lifetime (a virtual impossibility), you have just lost a minimum of $60,000 of my money. The total amount of your lost revenue, given inflation, will likely be far higher than that. That money will now go to your less-greedy competitors.
And that's just from me. I am going to urge my friends and extended family to follow suit. In addition, I operate a blog that receives several hundred visitors a month from all over the nation (and world). You can bet your bottom dollar that they are going to hear my views on your perfidy as well.
So I hope you enjoyed that last $72 purchase, because you will never see another thin dime from me.
Disgusted and angry regards,
GSmith
Houston, Texas
If you feel as I do about such shameless gouging, I urge you to take action and make your voice heard. This is sickening. The gas in their massive underground tanks didn't cost them a single dime more than it did two days ago, yet they've hiked their price
almost 80 cents per gallon in that two day span.
Kroger's management has seen fit to try to reap obscene profit from the horrible devastation that hurricane Katrina has wrought. It almost makes me want to vomit.
Kroger can rot in hell, as far as I am concerned.
And their little dog, too!