Exxon Mobil

[ashling]

A friend at work did some calculating and figured the EM profit at $1300 per second !:o :o

[rzemanfl]

1. What if we all went in with our little speed passes and put three

or four cents worth of gas in our cars while spending a lot of time cleaning windows, checking oil, etc.? Would that dent their profits?

[lapfog_1]

2. Unfortunately, no

there are very few, if any, "company stores". Almost all gas stations are franchise operations. Exxon makes their money out of selling gasoline, mostly to third party distributors. Boycotts and the like really don't effect them either, as they know you are driving X miles at Y mpg, so you will buy Z gallons of gas... even if it's from other dealers and chains, Exxon still makes their money (as you will buy gas from Shell or someone, and THEY will buy the gas from a distributor that is selling Exxon).

Nope, the only real way to hurt their profits is to have a glut of oil on the market (and in some markets, even this won't help).
The only way to have a glut is for either demand to decrease or supply to increase.

The only thing we can control is demand... so sell those gas guzzlers and buy hybrids or quit driving all together. Car pool a lot more, organize shopping trips to minimize mileage.

[TheFarseer]

3. thank you, voice of reason

The only thing that will lower prices is finding ALOT more oil (which at this point seems unlikely) or using less oil, which is what we've absolutely got to do.

[rzemanfl]

5. I bought a Geo Metro in 1997, the price of gas promptly went

down to under a buck a gallon. (The Saudis were using their clout to punish someone who dared to mess with OPEC.) I still have it, I filled up today and found I had gotten a little over 30 mpg in city driving, with automatic and with the a/c blasting in the Florida Summer. Someone is going to have to come up with something that gets some serious mileage before I would part with that car. The French car that runs on compressed air would be perfect for me and I hear that the exhaust is below zero, so it would have some ice-cold air conditioning right out of the tailpipe, no crooks telling you you need a thousand dollar repair when all you need is a $12.00 relay or a $7.00 can of R-135.

[Yupster]

4. The market capitalization of Exxon is

as of yesterday, $ 402 billion.

The profit they announced was $ 10 billion or 2.5 % of the company's value. That came out to $ 77,000 a minute.

If everyone theoretically sold their stock today and got the $ 402 billion and put it in a one year CD making 5.5 %, then the interest they earned would be $ 45,000 per minute.

Would that be obscene too?