re: Do gas stations set new pump prices every hour when oil prices are on the rise?

I’m a software engineer for a company that owns about 1k travel plazas throughout the US and CA.
There are very complex machine learning algorithms that determine the pricing, and they are basically constantly running and adjusting prices. There are also actual people monitoring the changes in price and it’s impact on sales.

Increasing prices has to be done carefully or we lose sales. Lowering prices is also painful because then we start to hit an area where we are selling gas for less than we bought it for.

Profit on gas basically just pays for the store itself. Only a couple cents per gallon actually contribute to bottom line profits. This is on average, and in a lot of places it’s sold at a loss.