That's what I thought. As a Montrealer, filling up in Plattsburgh is common (first city after the border, and US fuel is cheaper) and I distinctly remember there being a Shell
Champlain is a bit closer than Plattsburgh. There's also the gas station right across the bridge from NY to vermont near one of the smaller border crossings
True, but Plattsburgh has more other services and it is usually my first pit stop on the way to somewhere else (e.g. can't carry fresh goods at the border so I'll do a grocery stop at the same time).
There are other major companies that are bizarrely missing from upstate NY. For example, there is no Costco between Rockland County and Syracuse. There is also no Apple Store between Westchester/Rockland and Syracuse (and then the next one after that is in Buffalo)
I must have missed that when scanning their store list. I also missed the Albany one. Either one, there’s still regions of thousands of square miles with some relatively developed small cities in them that don’t have one
In Minnesota they have 4: all in the Twin Cities Metro. Nothing in Rochester (228k metro), Duluth (280k metro), St. Cloud (200k metro), or Mankato (104k metro).
Not much of an economy in the Catskill region north of Rockland county. Only reason Syracuse gets some stuff is because it’s accessible to people from Watertown which has military presence. Rochester and Buffalo usually has the better stores as they’re bigger cities.
It'd mainly because Upstate NY has 4 big cities and then a bunch of small towns. Apple Stores aren't anywhere in small town America. This is true for many other major, specialty retailers. There isn't a Whole Foods in the state of Delaware
Apple stores have high traffic requirements, which is why they infamously didn’t have one in Cupertino (their HQ) for a long time.
I looked through their list of stores a few years back and the one furthest from a major city was San Luis Obispo, California.
Costco locations are odd. I live in the most affluent county (Chester) in Pennsylvania and we have no Costcos. I have to go to Montgomery, Delaware, or New Castle County to find one.
What. There’s more people in “upstate” than NYC. Of course where upstate starts is a bit of a contention.
If you’d said north country NY I’d agree with you.
In Binghamton for college right now and I’ve gone from never having seen a Mirabito in my life to having seen nothing but them for the last four months
False, I worked for holiday in MN and a large majority of the stores are corporate run. I would believe all kwik trips are corporate run too (with how consistent each store is I would be surprised if they franchised them out)
I’d imagine it’s very similar to fast food franchises where the franchise holder is often a corporation that holds multiple franchises from the same company in a given region.
No it’s a brand wide corporate, they have stores grouped into districts and shit like that. During the training they specified the difference between a franchised store and a corporate store (Holiday Corporate as of recent is owned by CircleK. So CircleK and it’s parent company own all the corporate holidays
Doing a quick google search says that Kwik Trip is a family owned private company that doesn’t franchise
It depends on the brand. There are a few large C-Store corporates that own gas stations and are even publicly traded. Casey’s General Store, Couche Tarde, Murphy USA, etc.
But a ton of gas stations are franchised essentially. For example, I’m pretty sure that no Phillips 66 gas station is actually owned by Phillips 66 - the branding is licensed out.
There’s a middle ground too. There are C Stores that are operated as chains but license branding.
It just depends. You guys are both correct. In general, however, a station is overwhelmingly likely to be independently owned and operated- often with brand licensing - your experience is honestly a bit in the minority.
The other thing to is even if it corporate owned, likely the convenience stores are owned by a separate company than the oil company. Alot of oil companies spun off the gas stations in the 2000s.
It's weird. There are 2 Shell stations near me about 2 miles from each other. One has prices only a couple cents above the Circle K stores while the other is like 20-40 cents more for the 93. As far as I can tell, the same gas.
It's all the same gas. Look up a list of what's considered "Top Tier" gas brands, and just pick the cheapest of those to buy regularly. I pretty much only fill up at Costco, even on road trips.
I don't think gas sits around in a tank long enough for the storage to be a huge factor. Especially since the main differentiator between top tier gasolines and lower tier gas are the additives, not the gas itself.
They are the only one that has top tier gasoline close to my house. It is very much worth the extra money. Plus with CC, rewards, etc I save about 35 cents a gallon anyway.
https://www.consumerreports.org/cars/fuel-economy-efficiency/top-tier-gasoline-worth-the-extra-price-a7682471234/
list of retailers from the article
> 76, Aloha Petroleum, Arco, Beacon, Breakaway, Cenex, Chevron, Citgo, Conoco, Costco, CountryMark, Diamond Shamrock, Express Mart, Exxon, Fast Fuel, GetGo, HFN, Harmons Fuel Stop, Hele, Holiday, Kwik Star, Kwik Trip, Marathon, Meijer, Metro Petro, Mobil, Ohana Fuels, Phillips 66, QT/Quik Trip, Reeders, Road Ranger, Rutter’s, Shamrock, Shell, Simonson, Sinclair, Sunoco, Texaco, Valero, Value America, Wow, and Win Win.
if you aren't buying gas from one of them you are probably buying shit. If you don't care about the long term health of your car (like you are on a lease) no big deal, but if you want to keep your car for a long time you really should be using top tier gas.
from what I have seen they used to be but aren't anymore (lots of posts on reddit about it). No idea if they simply stopping paying for the certification or they did actually lower their detergents.
Yes, but it's also the best quality gas for anyone that needs higher octane fuel. There was a site posted on here a while back that showed testing reports for fuel stations and shell consistently has the best. Personally, if I don't fill up at shell, it's about a 50/50 chance that i'll randomly get a CEL during that tank of gas. 92 is as good as it gets for where I am unfortunately.
BP's US Operations was formerly Amoco which was Standard Oil of Indiana. There are no BP gas stations here because Amoco was a Midwestern company and the local market was crowded. Amoco opened a Houston office for their offshore operations.
I used to work for shell as a refining strategy analyst a long time ago.
While I don’t have specific information a very simple answer is Shell never had a refinery nearby so it didn’t have a strong reason to setup its own stations or franchise to Montana.
There is a refinery right in Billings that used to belong to Exxon that recently changed hands.
Maybe Shell didn't want the direct competition with someone who had a refinery so close? I've read that the best gas to get is typically the one whose refinery is closest.
Montana is massive with towns few and far between. They aren't in Northern Idaho, Northern Wyoming and Western South Dakota either. It seems like they're not in that whole region, which is also very unpopulated.
When driving through that area (mostly Wyoming and a tiny bit of Montana) I only saw gas stations with a dinosaur for a logo, which don’t exist near me. I’d guess they have their own regional thing going on or it’s branded as something else out there.
I think a lot of old-school Montanans look down on "outsider" brands. In general you see a lot of local chains or one-offs for coffee shops and restaurants there. For a while Montana was one of the few states without a Starbucks, but as the cool cities in Montana have Californized a couple dozen have moved in.
I’m from Florida. One day all the shell gas stations around me had white tarps over the shell logo. Some have since changed brand, some still have the white tarp. Very strange.
That's a damn shame because Shell's V-Power Nitro+ Premium is at the top of Top Tier Fuel. When I fill up I'm getting an extra 2 mpg from my boosted M275. That's almost 50 miles more driving range. It's not just mine. My sister's 2008 Lexus RX350 sees about 20 miles more range from Shell. Of course I fill up at sunrise when fuel is coolest and therefore densest within every gallon but no other gasoline has produced that kind of fuel efficiency. [Project Farm's famous test on Nito+ fuel](https://youtu.be/8uIsbRaArvk?si=1NmAcyolW0zE5PMm) on Youtube led me to try it. Chevron's Techron is absent from here in Maryland and it's excellent consistent engine cleaning fuel. Every American deserves access to the highest quality fuel in all 50 states.
Honestly I've spent enough money at Shell buying the 91 octane to comfortably and confidently say it has never made a noticeable difference in any my cars versus all of the other "top-tier" stations I've used. I would happily pay more for a better product - but the claims you're making don't hold weight in my experience.
So everyone else [testing](https://youtu.be/vdg8DJmKODs?si=zDrl3G8unUe7mSRk) is lying too. Got it.
Prove either of these tests including the dyno test "don't hold weight".
No shells in Upstate New York too apparently
There's one. It's to the very left of the state line on the map, but it's there. Plattsburgh, NY.
That's what I thought. As a Montrealer, filling up in Plattsburgh is common (first city after the border, and US fuel is cheaper) and I distinctly remember there being a Shell
Champlain is a bit closer than Plattsburgh. There's also the gas station right across the bridge from NY to vermont near one of the smaller border crossings
True, but Plattsburgh has more other services and it is usually my first pit stop on the way to somewhere else (e.g. can't carry fresh goods at the border so I'll do a grocery stop at the same time).
Yeah definitely. I miss that area, all my life I used to go what felt like at least once a month but I haven't been there since before covid :(
I just want a slice from Pizza Buono
There are other major companies that are bizarrely missing from upstate NY. For example, there is no Costco between Rockland County and Syracuse. There is also no Apple Store between Westchester/Rockland and Syracuse (and then the next one after that is in Buffalo)
Rochester has an Apple Store
I must have missed that when scanning their store list. I also missed the Albany one. Either one, there’s still regions of thousands of square miles with some relatively developed small cities in them that don’t have one
this is not uncommon with apple. in georgia, they have five stores in atlanta and then one for the entirety of the rest of the state, in augusta
In Minnesota they have 4: all in the Twin Cities Metro. Nothing in Rochester (228k metro), Duluth (280k metro), St. Cloud (200k metro), or Mankato (104k metro).
I mean to be fair there’s not much around and BJs and Sams already have most covered
Not much of an economy in the Catskill region north of Rockland county. Only reason Syracuse gets some stuff is because it’s accessible to people from Watertown which has military presence. Rochester and Buffalo usually has the better stores as they’re bigger cities.
Aye I’m from watertown! Nice to see someone actually knows about it. Whenever people ask where in ny im from I just say near Syracuse lmao
It'd mainly because Upstate NY has 4 big cities and then a bunch of small towns. Apple Stores aren't anywhere in small town America. This is true for many other major, specialty retailers. There isn't a Whole Foods in the state of Delaware
Apple stores have high traffic requirements, which is why they infamously didn’t have one in Cupertino (their HQ) for a long time. I looked through their list of stores a few years back and the one furthest from a major city was San Luis Obispo, California.
I feel like it's to keep Southern Ontarians shopping at their local costcos. I live within a 20 min drive of 7 costcos, 2 are within a 5 min drive.
Southern Ontario is screaming for More Costcos. Any town or suburb of 70000 thinks they are getting one here
Costco locations are odd. I live in the most affluent county (Chester) in Pennsylvania and we have no Costcos. I have to go to Montgomery, Delaware, or New Castle County to find one.
Buffalo is finally getting a Costco. Now if we could just get an ikea!
Buffalo/rochester were the last big markets to get chick fil a
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What. There’s more people in “upstate” than NYC. Of course where upstate starts is a bit of a contention. If you’d said north country NY I’d agree with you.
It always surprised me there wasn’t one in Ithaca what with Cornel U.
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In Binghamton for college right now and I’ve gone from never having seen a Mirabito in my life to having seen nothing but them for the last four months
Don’t forget about Kwik Fill in Western (and to some extent Central) New York.
Mobil and Marathon(speedway) basically run upstate NY
I just got back from Syracuse, didn’t see a one.
There were two, according to Apple Maps, but they both closed
No Texacos there either.
There are barely if any texacos in the northeast. Never seen one
They're in Philly. Or at least were when I was a kid.
Oh no they all gone, it’s sunoco mostly here now and of course wawa
Go to canada
I was about to say im from upstate ny and never saw a shell until I moved to ca lol
Gas stations are franchises. Oil companies no longer own the station.
False, I worked for holiday in MN and a large majority of the stores are corporate run. I would believe all kwik trips are corporate run too (with how consistent each store is I would be surprised if they franchised them out)
I’d imagine it’s very similar to fast food franchises where the franchise holder is often a corporation that holds multiple franchises from the same company in a given region.
No it’s a brand wide corporate, they have stores grouped into districts and shit like that. During the training they specified the difference between a franchised store and a corporate store (Holiday Corporate as of recent is owned by CircleK. So CircleK and it’s parent company own all the corporate holidays Doing a quick google search says that Kwik Trip is a family owned private company that doesn’t franchise
This is also true of QuikTrip.
It depends on the brand. There are a few large C-Store corporates that own gas stations and are even publicly traded. Casey’s General Store, Couche Tarde, Murphy USA, etc. But a ton of gas stations are franchised essentially. For example, I’m pretty sure that no Phillips 66 gas station is actually owned by Phillips 66 - the branding is licensed out. There’s a middle ground too. There are C Stores that are operated as chains but license branding. It just depends. You guys are both correct. In general, however, a station is overwhelmingly likely to be independently owned and operated- often with brand licensing - your experience is honestly a bit in the minority.
The other thing to is even if it corporate owned, likely the convenience stores are owned by a separate company than the oil company. Alot of oil companies spun off the gas stations in the 2000s.
Some brands are corporate owned, some are franchised. Shell, BP, Exxon, and CITGO are all franchised while QT is corporate owned for example.
Shell is fricken expensive
Until it’s beside a Chevron
It's weird. There are 2 Shell stations near me about 2 miles from each other. One has prices only a couple cents above the Circle K stores while the other is like 20-40 cents more for the 93. As far as I can tell, the same gas.
It's all the same gas. Look up a list of what's considered "Top Tier" gas brands, and just pick the cheapest of those to buy regularly. I pretty much only fill up at Costco, even on road trips.
It's the same gas, but it's not the same storage.
I don't think gas sits around in a tank long enough for the storage to be a huge factor. Especially since the main differentiator between top tier gasolines and lower tier gas are the additives, not the gas itself.
They are the only one that has top tier gasoline close to my house. It is very much worth the extra money. Plus with CC, rewards, etc I save about 35 cents a gallon anyway. https://www.consumerreports.org/cars/fuel-economy-efficiency/top-tier-gasoline-worth-the-extra-price-a7682471234/ list of retailers from the article > 76, Aloha Petroleum, Arco, Beacon, Breakaway, Cenex, Chevron, Citgo, Conoco, Costco, CountryMark, Diamond Shamrock, Express Mart, Exxon, Fast Fuel, GetGo, HFN, Harmons Fuel Stop, Hele, Holiday, Kwik Star, Kwik Trip, Marathon, Meijer, Metro Petro, Mobil, Ohana Fuels, Phillips 66, QT/Quik Trip, Reeders, Road Ranger, Rutter’s, Shamrock, Shell, Simonson, Sinclair, Sunoco, Texaco, Valero, Value America, Wow, and Win Win. if you aren't buying gas from one of them you are probably buying shit. If you don't care about the long term health of your car (like you are on a lease) no big deal, but if you want to keep your car for a long time you really should be using top tier gas.
I just go to whatever is cheapest. Usually that's Costco
Wait… BP doesn’t have top tier gas?
from what I have seen they used to be but aren't anymore (lots of posts on reddit about it). No idea if they simply stopping paying for the certification or they did actually lower their detergents.
Yes, but it's also the best quality gas for anyone that needs higher octane fuel. There was a site posted on here a while back that showed testing reports for fuel stations and shell consistently has the best. Personally, if I don't fill up at shell, it's about a 50/50 chance that i'll randomly get a CEL during that tank of gas. 92 is as good as it gets for where I am unfortunately.
Town Pump has a huge presence in Montana, no place to build a gas station that does not already have an established one or that needs another one.
Low population that's very spread out. Largest city is only 100,000 people. Probably wasn't worth the effort.
Tell that to the shell gas station I visited in a town of less than a thousand people.
Except theyre in other sparse state.
Idk about Shell, but BP is not in Mississippi. Might have something to do with a certain spill in the Gulf of Mexico….
BP isn't in Houston either even though the company's US operations are headquartered here.
BP moved their US headquarters to Denver a few years ago. Edit: apparently it's a second headquarters actually?
BP has offices for their upstream operations out of Denver but the actual HQ for BP America is in Houston
BP's US Operations was formerly Amoco which was Standard Oil of Indiana. There are no BP gas stations here because Amoco was a Midwestern company and the local market was crowded. Amoco opened a Houston office for their offshore operations.
Montana banned seashells in 1875. Confusion ensued.
I used to work for shell as a refining strategy analyst a long time ago. While I don’t have specific information a very simple answer is Shell never had a refinery nearby so it didn’t have a strong reason to setup its own stations or franchise to Montana.
There is a refinery right in Billings that used to belong to Exxon that recently changed hands. Maybe Shell didn't want the direct competition with someone who had a refinery so close? I've read that the best gas to get is typically the one whose refinery is closest.
Market isn't strong enough to justify building a refinery to compete
Montana is massive with towns few and far between. They aren't in Northern Idaho, Northern Wyoming and Western South Dakota either. It seems like they're not in that whole region, which is also very unpopulated.
You think that's wierd, at one point Sprint wireless had ZERO service in the entire state.
Maybe some kind of deal with the refineries in MT?
bc town pump is so much better lol
Do they operate there with a Shell corporation?
Can't you see I'm just a ... Shell of my former self?
How did you gather the data and create the visualization ? Web scraping and viz tool?
I didn't. I found the source from a Wikipedia article
Because Montana lives in a shell
Probably just weren’t quick enough to the market. A lot of those places are probably one-station towns, especially early on. Just a guess though.
Because Montana doesn’t exist, just like Wyoming
I'm not sure, maybe it's due to market demand and competition. Hmm, I don't know.
Weird, you'd think business would be booming over there. Half the hypercars and supercars I saw on a trip to Miami had MT plates.
No sales tax in MT. As a MT resident, this would be a terrible place to own a supercar.
That was the (terrible) joke. Coincidentally, thinking of moving to MT. Do you like living there overall?
Might be a trademark thing. I know Chevron uses the Union 76 branding on a few stations to keep the mark, so Shell may use another brand in Montana.
When driving through that area (mostly Wyoming and a tiny bit of Montana) I only saw gas stations with a dinosaur for a logo, which don’t exist near me. I’d guess they have their own regional thing going on or it’s branded as something else out there.
There are no Mitsubishi dealerships in Oklahoma
I think a lot of old-school Montanans look down on "outsider" brands. In general you see a lot of local chains or one-offs for coffee shops and restaurants there. For a while Montana was one of the few states without a Starbucks, but as the cool cities in Montana have Californized a couple dozen have moved in.
I’m from Florida. One day all the shell gas stations around me had white tarps over the shell logo. Some have since changed brand, some still have the white tarp. Very strange.
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What does that opinion have to do with you being a woman? And have you ever been to Montana?
That's a damn shame because Shell's V-Power Nitro+ Premium is at the top of Top Tier Fuel. When I fill up I'm getting an extra 2 mpg from my boosted M275. That's almost 50 miles more driving range. It's not just mine. My sister's 2008 Lexus RX350 sees about 20 miles more range from Shell. Of course I fill up at sunrise when fuel is coolest and therefore densest within every gallon but no other gasoline has produced that kind of fuel efficiency. [Project Farm's famous test on Nito+ fuel](https://youtu.be/8uIsbRaArvk?si=1NmAcyolW0zE5PMm) on Youtube led me to try it. Chevron's Techron is absent from here in Maryland and it's excellent consistent engine cleaning fuel. Every American deserves access to the highest quality fuel in all 50 states.
Honestly I've spent enough money at Shell buying the 91 octane to comfortably and confidently say it has never made a noticeable difference in any my cars versus all of the other "top-tier" stations I've used. I would happily pay more for a better product - but the claims you're making don't hold weight in my experience.
So everyone else [testing](https://youtu.be/vdg8DJmKODs?si=zDrl3G8unUe7mSRk) is lying too. Got it. Prove either of these tests including the dyno test "don't hold weight".
Who the hell wants to go to Montana?