marketing trick, they get a fancy price. The Standard Oil Company has a great number of fancy brands of both illuminating and lubricating oils, for which they get large prices—although often the oil itself comes from the same barrels as the ordinary grade. Now it is from the extra price obtained from naphtha, water-white, fancy brands, and by-products that the independent refiner makes up for his loss on export oil, and the Standard Oil Trust raises its dividends to forty-eight per cent. The independent refiner quoted above, who in January of 1904 lost 1⅜ cents on export oil, made enough on other products to clear 8.3 cents a barrel on his output—eighty-three dollars a day clear on a refinery of 1,000 barrels capacity, which represents an investment of $150,000.
Turn now to the price of domestic oil, and examine the chart to see if we have fared as well as the exporters. The line C on the chart represents the price per gallon in New York City of 150° water-white oil in barrels from the beginning of 1881 to June, 1904.[1] The figures used are those of the Oil, Paint and Drug Reporter. A glance at the chart is enough to show that the home market has suffered more violent, if less frequent, fluctuations than the export market. A suggestive observation for the consumer is the effect of a rise in crude on the price of domestic oil. The refined line usually rises two or three points to every one of the crude line. It is interesting to note, too, how frequently high domestic prices are made to offset low export prices; thus, in 1889, when the Standard was holding export oil low to fight competition in Europe, it kept up domestic oil. The same thing is happening to-day. We are helping pay for the Standard's fight with Russian, Roumanian and Asiatic oils. But this line, while it shows what the New York trade has paid, is a poor guide for the country as a whole. Domestic oil, indeed, has no regular price. Go back as far as anything
- ↑ Trustworthy and regular quotations are not to be obtained earlier than 1881.
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