Inflation has reached a 30-year-high, driving up the prices for consumers for everything from bread to gas.
While gas has always been expensive, it's even more so now.
These latest gas prices are the highest they've been in the last seven years. In the last month alone, the price at the pump has gone up 16 cents. In the last year, the price has increased by $1.30, according to reporting by Newsweek.
Bay Area commuters are feeling the price hike, too. "Basically I'm just on a strict budget every month," said one local driver, Tanya Brown. "So I'm paying less for food, for everything. Everything is high."
At a Shell Station near I-880 in the East Bay on Thursday morning, the price for unleaded was a whopping $4.99 a gallon and $5.19 for unleaded plus. Bay Area drivers are paying more at the pump than any others in the country, industry analyst Trilby Lundberg of the Lundberg Survey told KPIX on Thursday, at $4.77 per gallon.
Luckily, prices can be found lower than the average at some Bay Area stations, according to GasBuddy, where unleaded ranges from $4.17 to $4.29.
The main culprit behind the price increase is simply the demand is increasing, particularly as the economy continues to recover from the coronavirus pandemic. Overall, the price of crude oil has also been going up.
However, now that the days are getting darker earlier, demand could drop slightly, according to AAA. "Not everybody loves changing their household clocks for the end of Daylight Saving Time," AAA spokesperson Andrew Gross said in a statement earlier this week.
With shorter days due to Daylight Saving Time, people are more likely to go straight home from work rather than run errands in the dark, Gross added.
