Chevron announced recently that they plan to buy Hess in a friendly transaction. This will give them greater cash reserves, which they plan to use to buy back more shares. If approved, Chevron will allot $20 billion to stock share buybacks instead of the current $17.5 billion annually. No, they won’t decrease your price at the pump. As you may know, Hess gas stations are owned by Marathon and won’t be affected in this transaction.
Interesting, but–as you stated–this won’t reduce their pump prices.
I hold shares in both Chevron and Marathon, so it should be interesting to see how this might affect share prices. I assume that it will boost the price of Chevron shares, but… Wer weiß??
A few years ago all the Hess stations in my area turned into Speedway stations. I don’t know if Hess was grooming itself for a sale?
Hess sold all of their stations to Speedway, several years ago. Speedway is owned by Marathon, and Marathon is now selling them to Chevron.
When Hess Gasoline station first started to become popular in the 1960s they were the cheapest gasoline around in up-state New York. I remember asking why the name brands, Esso, Mobile, Sunoco, Flying A, Shell, Gulf, and others… (Oh my head is starting to hurt…) charged so much for their gas when Hess was so much cheaper and almost to as if it was a practiced explanation; the name brands said they would be cheaper too if they sold the gas from the dregs of the tanks. We were told it was the “left overs” from the tanker trucks, the storage depots, and the draining’s from old gas stations…
To hear it be told, you would think you could see the chunks of debris glugging up the gas hose…
Many years ago, I used to use Hess gas fairly frequently, due to it being a few cents cheaper than the “major” brands. The only thing I ever noticed was that the inside of my carburetor was stained red from the use of Hess gas, but the cars’ performance never suffered.
Leon Hess was a purely local success story, and when he died a lot of people in this area were saddened.
I never had any problems with using Hess gasoline either. I did not use it much as the stations were not all that close by and all the “name brands” were service stations, with mechanics, and where automobile work was performed. So I knew most of those station owners, the Hess Stations were only gas stations, no bays, no mechanics, and they only sold gas and oil and only the “help” pumped the gas…
I’m skeptical. Hess was a refiner and marketer of gasoline until 1968 when they joined with Amerada Petroleum, becoming a fully integrated oil company. Since Hess and then Amerada Hess refined their own gasoline, they didn’t need to buy the bottom of the tank junk which probably never existed anyway. Vertical integration means that they didn’t have to buy from a supplier at each level who was trying to maximize his profit. Within their own operation they had control of all costs from exploration to the pump.
I am sorry, I did not mean to imply that I believed the “practiced explanation” that I was fed by the big name garage owners… I am just saying that is what I was told… ( and that is what I wrote…). I was a naive, teenager who was “getting the word” from folks that I thought were respectable station owners and mechanics.
And I did not take their word for it and in my subsequent posting two posts later, I wrote that I never had problems with their gas, I just did not use it much since the stations were a distance away and I knew most the station owners and mechanics in the nearby garages, so they got my patronage…
“Car Guys” like hanging out with Car Guys… my closest friends were all car guys and we were often referred to as the “Bardahl Boys” because we were always working on our cars and our clothing seems to always smell of hypoid oil (which has a very distinctive “aroma”) that never seemed to wash out of our clothing…
We could hang out at the various big name garages, but there was no hanging out at a Hess Station. It had no bays and it had no mechanics…
And even then, Hess Stations were remarkably clean, no spilled oil, no stack of old tires, no cars up on blocks, no piles of dead batteries and the rest rooms usually had toilet paper rolls and not the little square sheets to take care of business and do you remember when the hand drying rack was a spool of hand towel that when you pulled down it pulled up what had been used? Hess used disposable paper towels and most of the big name garages (probably because they were much older…) had those rolling towel racks that when they ran out, they were simply rewound and used again and that towel got pretty grubby before it got changed… L 
L . . .
Oh! You’re forgetting Texaco! They were big where I grew up in Rochester, NY!
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Oh, now my pride hurts, you’re right, I did forget Texaco and I should not have, their Jingo was catchy and all us kids sang it, “You can trust your car to the man who wears the star, the big, bright Texaco Star…”
Now Everybody, one more time…
Loudthunder! Alright! Brings back memories!
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