I Tracked Gas Prices at 600 Costcos During the Strait of Hormuz Crisis
Tracking Costco gas prices
When gas prices spiked during the Strait of Hormuz crisis, a Tampa commuter built a scraper to track prices at every Costco in the US. By sweeping Costco's hidden APIs, he collected data from 600 warehouses, revealing 38,018 price changes in 154 days—with cuts outpacing hikes. The project, powered by TimescaleDB and Next.js, is now a live dashboard that lets anyone compare prices before choosing a warehouse.
A company that treats gas as a rounding error still has to move with the market… eventually.
- culi
GasBuddy is great for this. You can see average gas prices across all gas stations for a certain region (or nation-wide).
https://www.gasbuddy.com/charts
The data goes back even over 25 years if you play around with the query params (it started in June of 2000). E.g.
https://charts.gasbuddy.com/ch.gaschart?Country=USA&Crude=f&...
- phainopepla2
It's crazy to me that gas in Hawaii, 3k miles out into the Pacific, is cheaper than most of California.
- NDlurker
I drove from Fargo to Port Angeles recently and hit up Costco for gas as much as possible. Should have written reviews of the Costcos along I94/I90. Billings was the best.
- 0cf8612b2e1e
Costco gas is famously a loss leader, typically running 15 to 20 cents below surrounding stations.
Is this true? I always assumed that Costco just had better deals/longer horizon commitments so it could undercut local stations. Maybe they even own a refinery just to maintain the best margin.
- 1970-01-01
Tracking Costco gas doesn't make much sense as Costco doesn't make money on gas. They use it as a loss-leader for memberships.