From a reader:

Jonah,
The boycott idea might be nice, but according to SNOPES: http://www.snopes.com/politics/gasoline/gasout.asp
“Economics Prof. Pat Welch of St. Louis University says any boycott of “bad guy” gasoline in favor of “good guy” brands would have some unintended (and unhappy) results.
. . . Welch says the law of supply and demand is set in stone. “To meet the sudden demand,” he says, “the good guys would have to buy gasoline wholesale from the bad guys, who are suddenly stuck with unwanted gasoline.”
So motorists would end up . . . paying more for it, because they’d be buying it at fewer stations.
And yes, oil companies do buy and sell from one another. Mike Right of AAA Missouri says, “If a company has a station that can be served more economically by a competitor’s refinery, they’ll do it.”
Right adds, “In some cases, gasoline retailers have no refinery at all. Some convenience-store chains sell a lot of gasoline — and buy it all from somebody else’s refinery.”
I’m sympathetic with trying to boycott ol’ Hugo but it sounds as though it might be rather futile…

Me: Hmmm. I understand the point, but slower sales in the retail sector cannot be something Citgo wants, otherwise they wouldn’t have retail venders in the first place, right? If everyone stopped buying from Citgo, would the executives at Citgo not care at all? If so why did they spend all that money on gas stations?

Regardless, if you don’t want to go cold turkey, then you can at least stop buying from Citgo minimarts. If Citgo is left with a surplus of beer nuts and beef jerky, they might have to sell it all wholesale, but it would certainly be at their loss (and, if the price were right, my gain!).