I think your question illustrates something I spoke of, and that is the comparison that so often is made is the comparison to crude oil prices, not to wholesale rack prices. If you actually looked at pump price changes in relation to changes at wholesale gasoline, as opposed to crude oil, you'd find that there is far more of a rationale to the changes at the pump.
But specifically, we do see pump prices tending to go up in large amounts, and when they come down, they tend to float down in small amounts. Although that would appear to consumers to be anti-competitive, if you look at the underlying mechanism as to why that's happening, it's actually indicative of a very competitive market. I'll explain why as briefly as I can.
When wholesale prices are rising, dealers are very reluctant to pass that along until they get to the point, as Mr. MacEwen has said, where sometimes they're actually selling below cost. Somebody cries uncle, the price goes up, and it goes up by a large amount in order to get back to that level of margin.
Incidentally, in our data analysis, that increase, that restoration, does not go up higher than the historical in order to recover the loss. It generally only restores to the level of margin the market is accustomed to. When wholesale prices are going down, dealers are much faster to respond to that decrease, and they'll pass that decrease along more instantaneously, faster, and in smaller increments to basically follow that wholesale price down.
So again, what appears to be bad competition, based on comparing to crude prices, is actually highly competitive when you look at the underlying mechanism--using wholesale gasoline as the comparator, which is what dealers use in order to make their decisions.