Crude crashes twenty bux so why is my local gas station selling gasoline at the same price as last week? It's because the oil companies bought crude 45 days ago at whatever price crude was then, so while the stuff on the high seas was bought lower they cannot lower the price til the new crude is refined. As a point: commodities have a pattern of collapsing when prices fail to rise for a certain amount of time, so this price collapse is nothing to get excited about. If you ever studied the day trading of any commodity you'd note that the "auction" on the floor always follows the pattern of leaning against the highs and leaning against the lows; it inevitably follows that eventually a lean will crash through a price barrier. Supply and demand? When everyone percieves that there's too much product everyone sells.