raise gas another buck please and take profits for are poor school administrators only making 150k to 200k a year..

Any type of organized boycott will drive the price of gas down - temporarily. As soon as things quiet down the price will sneak back up. The oil companies pay millions to consultants and marketing firms to know our collective habits better than we do. Yes, 50 cents a gallon is a lot of money. In reality it comes out to maybe $10 to $20 a week for the average motorist. There will always be extremes on the both ends. Of course, that $20 or more is better in our pockets than those of the oil company execs. It pains me to say this, but the only way to lower the cost of gasoline and keep it there for any appreciable length of time is by intervention of the federal government. Think about it, if gasoline prices went back down to $2 a gallon and the public had reasonable assurances that it would stay at that cost for a while our economy would bust through the ceiling. We can dream.

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People have known gas prices can spike since 2008. You have to be prepared for these things. I live near downtown Mokena because I can walk or ride my bike to the train, grocery store, library, etc.

If you've bought a car since the spike in 08 and it's anything larger than a mini-van (of course this excludes work trucks for those that need them) then it's really you're own fault when you have to fill that behemoth up.

Every person that buys a big vehicle that they don't need drives up the price of gas for everyone else by spiking demand.

The federal government can't do anything other than subsidize. China and India want gas and they have many many more people. As the second world becomes part of the industrialized world the demand is only going to go up.

It might help to educate the public on the breakdown of the price of gas at the pump, like where all the taxes go and how those tax dollars are spent.

Illinois residents are getting fleeced - at the pump, at retail stores with high sales tax, income tax increases to pay for pension abuse, on their property taxes (especially school district taxes), registration fees, tolls, etc. They should be mad as hell at all of the above and not take it anymore.

Frankfort residents are almost always getting fleeced at the gas pumps - We always look elsewhere when driving around and 90% of the time buy it cheaper out of Frankfort. I agree with a previous comment, Illinois is taxing the residents into poverty to pay for their government pensions, school pensions and bigger government with more government employees. Most government employees would die if they had to work in the private sector and "heaven forbid" they wouldn't get their golden pensions! Wake up to the real world.

@518:

It's my opinion that Frankfort would see more competitive prices if the village had one or two independently owned gas stations (ones that aren't owned by a major oil company). But given this community's size and the razor-thin profit margin service stations work on, I don't think that's likely to happen.

As a side note: Can we drop the "government workers are slackers" cliche? It's reductive and as useful when it comes to discussing economic issues as saying "all rich people are bad." It cuts both ways. Meritocracy in the labor force is not only found in the private sector, nor are cushy, redundant jobs solely the product of government employment. And when it comes to golden pensions, I'm pretty sure the private sector has been doing a fine job of handing out more-than-substantial nest eggs to individuals who might be less-than-worthy.

Remember: When you paint government workers with that broad brush, you're throwing "slackers" such as soldiers in Afghanistan under the bus. Oh sure, you don't mean "those government workers," but I bet if you started marking a list as to who was exempt, you might find yourself with a minority of actual goldbrickers.

Joe Vince
Local Editor, Frankfort

Joe, Illinois residents are getting fleeced by the burdensome taxes, regulations, and government and pension abuse. This plays a very large role in the cost of living and doing business in this state. We must get rid the the bad apples in government offices, streamline services, bring real pension reform to the state.

How much do these stations pay in property taxes?

There's nothing you can do about it besides not buy gas from those stations, or buy a really fuel efficient car to put a dent in the amount of gas you consume.

Just like any other staple of American living, milk, bread, tv, internet, the automobile and the fuel to run it is a product just about everyone will buy, at any price, because the only other choice is not driving, and that's about as realistic as not eating to try and do something about high food prices.

The oil companies own the goverment. National, state, local. You can complain and whine and moan all you want about gas prices, but at the end of the day, you and everyone else buy gas, no matter how much it costs.

The only power the people have is as a mass of consumers. We saw it back when GM went bankrupt and gas prices dived when millions of people traded in their SUVs for compact cars, refused to buy all the new SUVs GM was telling us we all wanted, and went on with our lives. But even then, there's no consequences for them, GM got bailed out, the gas companies got away with raping our wallets and making yet more record profits, and we let them. This is just the cycle repeating itself.

The only other thing I could suggest is running for public office and getting rid of your elected officals who are in bed with the gas companies and letting them get away with this.