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Why do gas stations charge different amounts in the same local area?
When I ran a gas station, our price was largely set by our neighbors-- the other gas stations in the area. We couldn't go below the current cost of replacement gas, but other than that we wanted to be at .05 over the average. (We got away with charging more because we were the last station on a major road.) Everybody else did the same thing. Also, we only set prices once a day, early in the morning before the commuter rush. Changing prices while somebody is pumping gas Was Not Done, for fairly obvious reasons. So, you'd get these ripples of price-changing, as one station changed its price, and then all its neighbors would react to that the next day, and then THEIR neighbors would change the day after that, and so on.