The necessities of life are so painfully expensive now that every trip to the deli causes our head to spin so forcefully we fear it might roll right off our shoulders. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, ground coffee is 18.9 percent more expensive than it was a year ago, and beef for that pot roast is up 18.4 percent. Orange juice is like liquid gold at the moment. Some of these price hikes are due to the tariffs, yes, but some are the result of wrath-of-nature-type forces, such as citrus disease in Florida groves. As easy as it may be to assign a single cause to food price inflation, it is, of course, more complicated.
Meanwhile, in addition to these general inflationary pains, we on the South Fork suffer from an additional indignity: Hamptons markup. Some retailers cannot avoid passing along higher prices because they themselves are paying higher prices (for property taxes, rent, insurance, wages), but other businesses seem just to have gotten into the spirit of sticker shock for the sake of sticker shock. Why is that side container of guacamole $14? Who decided a $65 parka from Amazon should be $125 when resold as a castoff at a Hamptons thrift store? Why does a bagel with cream cheese cost $2 less in Greenport? Why is my turkey and Swiss sandwich $18?
Why? Because around here, anything goes. The sky’s the limit.
The notable exception this month, as all drivers will be aware, are the lower prices at the gas station. Merry Christmas! The last time gas was so low at the pump was in the spring of 2021, when Covid-19 was still tamping down the cost of driving and the national average for a gallon was $3.04, according to Trading Economics, which compiles the raw data. Of course it’s easy to forget that that $3.04 felt expensive back then — no one thought that was low at the time, because it wasn’t — but after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the costs skyrocketed up to over $5 a gallon. Ouch.
Gas this week has dipped below $3 across the nation. The lower price, the experts say, is partly to do with “drill, baby, drill.” It’s also to do with this being early winter, when gas prices usually slack off a bit; plus there’s the fact that the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries is pumping out more crude.
It’s nice to be paying less at the pump, but, once again, South Forkers are feeling the gouge. Around here? Expect to pay still more than $4 a gallon for regular.
People often excuse Hamptons markup by pointing out that whatever it is — a dozen red roses, a gallon of diesel — had to travel farther to get here. Nonsense. There is zero logistical reason for a fat, chunky price difference between a gas station in, say, Water Mill and one on North Main Street in East Hampton, or even Montauk. If travel costs were the reason, you’d expect higher prices up a winding mountainside road in Appalachia. (Spoiler: It’s below $3 in rural West Virginia.)
And, as former Assemblyman Fred Thiele so rightly told The Star in 2024, gas prices at branded chain stations are controlled by the big international companies such as Exxon or Mobil, which have carved the South Fork out as a high-price zone. Basically, they are sticking it to us because they can: “In essence, big oil companies engage in a price-gouging scheme called zone pricing, by charging prices that are based on geography totally unrelated to actual cost. In short, big oil charges more on the South Fork because they believe ‘the Hamptons’ can afford it.”