You may have heard the “tip” about saving money by buying gasoline in the morning. You might have also read that saving money by exploiting negative thermal expansion is negligible at best. It seems to me there might be something to it, after all.

Twice now I’ve purchased gasoline before my morning commute, and returned home to find prices have been raised by a nickel or thereabouts. My best guess is that the stations don’t raise their prices until after 8:00 a.m. or so, when the managers show up for the day shift (since the poor underpaid bastards working the graveyard shift aren’t about to leave their bulletproof box in the wee hours). Casual observation of other stations in my area suggests that the pattern is reproduced at other stations besides the two I frequent.

So the myth about saving money on gas in the morning may be true, just for completely different reasons. As always, of course, your mileage may vary.