BUFFALO, N.Y. — Gas prices in Western New York are lower than they have been in more than five years.
Some gas stations on the Seneca Nation's Allegany teritory in Salamanca were offering gas prices for less than $1 a gallon on Thursday as the coronavirus pandemic has caused the global oil market to collapse.
Now wholesale gasoline prices are dropping to levels many never thought possible.
So you might be wondering: why are some stations, such as those in downtown Buffalo, still around $2.30 a gallon or more?
Experts say one issue is that people aren't buying much gas, so stations are still selling fuel they purchased days, even weeks ago, when wholesale prices were higher.
They're dropping a lot each day.
You'll tend to see cheaper gas at busier stations, such as along highways, because their tanks aren't full of fuel that was trucked in when prices were higher.
"It's a supply and demand issue," Elizabeth Carey, the AAA director of communications, said Friday.
"Even the refineries themselves are kind of full of winter blend fuel that they need to unload to actually make the summer blend of fuel, and this is the time when we usually switch over between the two, so yeah, there's fuel that's already been purchased at a certain price, so they probably have to sell it at a certain rate."
