I'm endlessly amused by all these comparisons to snapple, water and so forth. I'm wondering who introduced this rediculous meme in the first place... obviously someone with a vested interest in keeping people from freaking out over gas prices.
First off, and lets be real here, most people drink their water from a tap which only has some nominal municipal water charge, or however much it costs in power to run it from the well and filter it. BOTTLED water, a luxury, charges what people are willing to pay, like every other luxury (ie. snapple, potato chips, or whatever other measure of cost-per-weight you want to use).
What all those luxuries don't do, that gas/oil does, is increase the price of OTHER things. You don't see the cost of bottled water affect the price of a head of lettuce, or the price of scope. The price of gas, however, DOES affect the price of that lettuce directly. If it costs an extra $.25 per head to transport it, you can bet that it'll cost an extra $.35 in the store to buy it, in addition to the extra buck it cost to get you to the store in the first place.
