Here’s a fun idea for a drinking game: gather your alcoholic friends around the TV at 6 pm or 11 pm (or if you’re truly committed drunks, 7 am.) Turn on the local news. Anytime an anchor uses the phrase “pain at the pump”, do a shot. If the same phrase appears as a graphic, do 2 shots.

The standard wisdom is that not only are the gas companies setting their prices criminally high, but that it’s crucial that we as consumers take whatever means necessary to economize. It’s thus a moral imperative to find the cheapest gas we can, wherever that might be.

This cultural obsession with recording and comparing gas prices has led to the proliferation of websites devoted to posting prices- Gas Buddy, Gas Price Watch, etc. Even MSN recently got in and took the concept mainstream. Each site helpfully prompts you for a ZIP code and then tells you where you can go to save a few pennies a gallon.

Here’s what’s happening with gas prices in the ZIP code that contains Control Your Cash’s world headquarters.

(Yes, we have a local retailer named “Terrible’s.”)

The cheapest gas on the map is at Location 1, in the southeast. Say we’re stuck in the inconvenient northwest, where retailers are gouging us with expensive $3.85/gallon gas, and we want to take advantage of that sweet bargain-basement $3.79/gallon gas on the other side of town.

To accentuate the point, let’s assume we drive a car that sips fuel judiciously. So we get in our theoretical 36 mpg Honda Civic and drive to the 7-Eleven, ready to fill the trusty coupe’s 13.2-gallon tank. But wait. The needle’s only at the 1/4 mark. Should we drive around the block a few dozen times and thus save even more?

Let’s say we act rationally and don’t. That means we buy 9.9 gallons, and save 6¢ on each one. For a total of 59¢. Easy street, here we come.

And it was only 5 miles out of our way, 10 miles round trip, which means we burned .27 gallons to get there. Or $1.07. Net loss 48¢, not including the 20 minutes or so it took to drive there and back. Even if you value your time at a mere $8 an hour, that’s another $2.67 you’re out for a total of $3.15 just to hunt for cheap gas.

You see? That military-industrial complex has its fangs in so deeply, that they’ve now got it costing us $3.15 just to shop for gas, let alone buy it!

The problem is obvious – there just isn’t that much difference between cheap and expensive gas in the same locale. It’s not like we chose an extreme example to illustrate this. We didn’t go looking for the part of the country that filled the bivariate conditions of having the smallest discrepancy between low and average prices, and the maximum distance between them, only to happen to find that place in our backyard.

Gas Price Watch and its ilk seem to have enough regular readers to stay viable: it boasts 173,382 “member spotters”. If that many contribute to Gas Price Watch, then at least as many must use it, right?

What a waste of resources, brainpower, bandwidth and more.

In the extremely unlikely event that your neighborhood station is selling gas for $6/gallon while one half a mile away is selling it for $4, then fine; go out of your way to buy the cheaper stuff. But under any set of real-world circumstances, you’re mildly crazy if you don’t simply fill up where and when it’s convenient.

**This article is featured in the Totally Money Blog Carnival #27, the Titanium Edition**

**This article is also featured in Totally Money Blog Carnival – Trivia Edition – July 18 2011**