Saving 10 Cents a Gallon Won't Help..doing this will

It is a well known cliche’ of the love affair Americans have with their automobiles. It odes seem to mater the status symbol of the four wheels we ride on cars represent freedom. And is that not what America is all about...freedom? From the classic 1955 Chevy to the latest Lexus it is hard to separate us from our cars.

Americans are also in love with convenience. Witness the surge in fast food joints and the increasing amount of food dollars spent on take out and dining out versus dining in. It is a right of the commuting culture to drink coffee on the way to work. Drive thru coffee windows once a west coast phenomenon are now common place all over America. Several franchisors offer drive thru coffee shop formats that are solely that..........coffee and baked goods.

The best these days for a 10 ounce coffee and buttered hard roll combo now exceeds two bucks.
Get this morning ritual at a national chain switch the hard roll for a bagel cost is closer to three dollars. This does not include the upgrades for the latte’ and cappuccino crowd. These upgraded
luxuries run the bill beyond the current cost of a gallon of gas.

However the focus remains on the cost of the fuel to get to the donut shop in the morning. Drivers search for the station with a lower fuel cost to save a nickel on a gallon of gas and pay no heed to the
hidden costs of the daily commute.

Assuming your car gets 20 miles per gallon and your daily round trip is 40 miles. You are using two gallons of gas per day at a cost of $7.00. Like may other morning crusaders you line up in the drive thru lane at Dunkin Donuts craving the fuel that runs you for the morning, coffee and a bagel. The Dunkin Donuts drive thru on Rt 44 in Poughkeepsie is often stacked 10 cars deep waiting for take off. If the average serve time is sixty seconds for an order of one coffee and one bagel you can expect a 10 minute wait. All the while you engine is running consuming expensive gas. A car idling uses about one gallon of gas per hour.

Now you gas bill may seem high at $7 per day but now add in the coffee stop to come up with your real cost for the morning drive. Coffee and a bagel adds $3.00. What about the 10 minute wait in line at the drive thru? At $3.50 per gallon a ten minute wait adds costs 58 cents for the gas used while waiting in line. The total cost for the morning drive is now $11.08.

Searching for lower gas prices doe little to save money for the average commuter. Even I find gas for 10 cents per gallon less my daily savings would amount to 40 cents for my 100 mile four gallon a day round trip. That amounts to twelve dollars a month or $144 per year. An average commuter driving 40 miles per day would save a lot less.

To really lessen the daily impact of commuting means giving up or changing one of the commuters
bill of rights. The morning coffee and pastry. Instead of waiting in line at the drive thru park and walk in. At the Dunkin Donuts I pass every day there is never more than one person standing in line while the cars average ten deep at the drive thru. Savings, 58 cents per day, three times the amount of paying 10 cents a gallon less for gas. Amazingly this translates into $11.60 per month or around $130 dollars a year saved just by parking your car and walk in to get coffee instead of waiting at the drive thru.

Of course savings really sky rocket for commuters who give up buying coffee and a pastry on the way to work and instead bring coffee and hard rolls from home. The cost of making coffee at home is around 20 cents a cup and hard rolls can be had in bulk for 30 cents a piece.

Savings for the brown bagger: $2.50 per day, $30 per month and $360 per year. Over a twenty year career the amount saved runs up to $7200. Invested at traditional stock market returns of nine percent annually over the course of twenty years that small savings of $2.50 a day would easily exceed ten thousand dollars when it comes time for the retirement dinner.

Greg Draiss lives in Greene County and commutes to Poughkeepsie, just over 100 miles a day round trip. In addition Greg is a freelance writer and photographer and owner of Epigram Media Service.