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Saipan gas prices up 10 cents again
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Posted on Jan 07 2014
Saipan motorists got their first sticker shock for the year after Mobil Oil Mariana Islands increased its gas pump prices by 10 cents a gallon Monday night, bringing the price of regular unleaded gasoline to $4.959 a gallon. This, as the price of oil hovered over $94 a barrel amid cold weather in the United States.
“It’s affecting us big time,” Pamela Combs told Saipan Tribune as she filled up her pickup truck yesterday at a Mobil service station in Garapan. “Grocery is going up, gas price is going up but the minimum wage didn’t go up. It’s like we’re working only to be able to buy gas.”
Combs, a resident of Achugao, said their family’s heard-earned dollars could only go so far to survive each day and the added fuel cost only worsens their situation.
Jesse Deleon Guerrero, of Dandan, said a gas price hike “is a bad way to start a new year.”
Garapan resident Felipe Serrano, meanwhile, said motorists like him can’t do anything about gas price increases.
“I hope this would be the highest and no more,” he said yesterday while buying $5 gas for his pickup truck at a Mobil station.
As of late yesterday afternoon, Shell Marianas’ gas prices remained unchanged. However, Mobil and Shell have historically mirrored each other’s price changes within a day or two.
With Monday night’s 10-percent gas price increase, the price of regular unleaded gasoline on Saipan is now $4.959 a gallon.
Super unleaded gasoline is now $5.279 a gallon on Saipan.
Diesel on Saipan now stands at $5.519 a gallon, a bit more than the CNMI’s current minimum wage of $5.55 an hour.
Gas prices on Rota and Tinian are much higher than those on Saipan. Overall gas prices in the CNMI are among, if not the highest, on American soil.
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[B]MOBIL PRICES[/B] REGULAR: $4.959PREMIUM: $5.279
DIESEL: $5.519
* Per gallon prices
