ORIGINAL: DamnSkippy
And one thing to consider, I remember seeing pictures of a gasoline costing over a dollar in the early 70's ...
If you saw that, you saw something being done illegally. When I started working at a Vickers Oil Co. station in Des Moines, Iowa, in May 1973, gas was already under government price controls, and two days after I started, we had to lower the price of regular from 34.9 cents a gallon to 32.9 cents per gallon (I remember this well, because it was the first time I had to go up on our very HIGH sign to change the numbers). The Arab oil embargo didn't hit till late fall '73, and even then, the price was allowed to rise very SLOWLY because of the government price controls. By the time I quit working at Vickers in about November of 1975, the price ranged between 49.9 cents a gallon to 51.9 cents a gallon. I'm not sure when the government price controls were officially lifted, but it wasn't till the 1990s in Texas that I saw gasoline over $1 a gallon. And even then, in about 1999, it went back down to 98 cents a gallon.