Gas Station Workers Face Angry Customers

The AP article is here:

http://www.breitbart.com/news/2005/08/26/D8C7BBRO0.html

I am not surprised in the least by this. I worked in retail for several years, and it never ceased to amaze me how utterly ignorant and shortsighted some people are. Anyone who has ever had a job -- private sector or otherwise -- out to have enough sense to know that the person working behind the counter at a gas station does not control the prices. Do you really suppose that these people don't realize that gas prices are high everywhere? And do they think that yelling at a gas station employee is going to help the situation in any way?

One part of this AP article really jumps off the page. Bruce Hutton, professor of marketing at the University of Denver, says that there is a sense of entitlement among consumers today.

Yes! How true that is! I'm glad someone said it. For one thing, consumers are used to being pampered by retailers who practice a "customer's always right" policy and try to please them in any way to stay competitive.

But another type of entitlement attitude is fostered by liberal propaganda. Many people I speak to blame George W. Bush for high gas prices. What makes them think that the U.S. president controls the price of gasoline? Liberal propaganda. When gas prices were low in the late '90's, many people (including the media) credited Bill Clinton for that convenience. No one could explain how he had anything to do with it, but they seemed to believe it. When gas prices began to rise dramatically during the last year of the Clinton administration, Al Gore demagogued the situation in his 2000 presidential campaign. He accused U.S. oil companies of "gouging" consumers, and promised to make them stop if he was elected president. Of course, he was vice president at the time. And Bill Clinton, the man who allegedly kept the gas prices low in the years leading up to that, was still president. So if there was any type of quick-fix solution to the oil-pricing problem, they could have done it before they left office.

But this thought doesn't seem to occur to liberals. Ever since Bush was elected in late 2000, I have heard liberals blame him for high energy prices (yes, they seem to believe he started causing the problem before he was even inaugurated). Just the other week, a co-worker of mine claimed that Clinton was the greatest president because (among other things Clinton had nothing to do with) gas was cheap during his presidency. I'll cut this particular co-worker some slack, because he is only 21 years old, so he has a short historical memory and has been brainwashed by liberal propaganda, in school and elsewhere. But an alarming number of older people express the same sentiment. I refuse to believe that they really don't know better. I think they are simply willing to forget everything they know, just for the sake of criticizing Bush and praising Clinton. Ever since the Clinton administration, when liberals excused everything their president did, I have made the unsettling observation that liberals have increasingly become prisoners of their ideology.