Thank you for your question.
As we heard in the previous panel, prices in regional and even local retail markets are affected by a number of different factors. Leaving aside the price of crude oil and the wholesale price, there can be a variety of factors in the rack price, such as the type of gasoline station in the market, whether it is a high- or low-volume gas station, the throughput, the number of competitors in a particular market, and also the aggressiveness of competitors. There are possibly markets--and I'm not even talking about regional markets.... In some local markets a competitor can be a maverick, if you want to believe it, who likes to price as low as he can. A variety of factors will affect retail prices in different markets.
As to your question about why we sometimes see prices move in lockstep, what we heard previously is true. It is a market that is fairly transparent. At street level it is very easy for clerks in individual gasoline stations to look across the street or down the street or even drive around the local town to identify what the price movements are and make a decision at that point either to move them upward or downward or to have them stay where they are.