Small business and professors give perspective on rising fuel costs

COLUMBIA, Mo. (KMIZ)

The impact of high gas prices is affecting everyone, one landscaping business explains how it's coping.  

Keeping that cost from clients is what Dan Savage is hoping to avoid, but the rising costs has him worrying about how long he can keep from it.

As a small business owner of a landscaping company, Savage woke up to a surprise at the gas pump Friday morning. 

"It was shocking, this morning it was up forty cents from yesterday afternoon," said Savage.

Filling up the mowers, weed-eaters and his truck is a part of doing business and a cost that he wants to keep away from his clients

"If this keeps going to six to seven dollars, I am going to have to put more money and shift that to my customers, and nobody wants to do that, throw in inflation and no one wants to do that, it is becoming an issue," said Savage

So when that daily fuel cost begins to hit close to $250?

"So, yeah at the end of the day, when you worked twelve hours and you start crunching the numbers, and you're paying twice as much for gas than you were a year ago, then yeah that is concerning. I've done this twenty years and I have never seen it like this before, my dad turns 72 today, obviously, he has never seen this," said Savage.

Savage says that right now his fuel costs for a week are between $1,300 and $1,500 dollars a week.  

With a new daily fuel cost of nearly $250, Savage is seeing some of those profits begin to get smaller.

"So, yeah at the end of the day, when you worked twelve hours and you start crunching the numbers, and your paying twice as much for gas than you were a year ago, then yeah that is concerning," said Savage.

Lincoln University professor Eleazar Gonzalez says that while this may seem like stress on the wallet it is all part of a cycle.

"This type of cycle happens all the time, and we all in one of those perspective is we haven't hit the high point then we will start going down," said Gonzalez. 

Joe Haslag with the University of Missouri agrees, saying the increased prices we saw last year in the grocery store are just a part of this cycle.

"We had a big run-up in energy prices, food prices shot up as well.  The world will settle down and oil prices will go back down and oil prices will go back to $80 to $90 dollars a barrel instead of $120," said Haslag.

As the United States see an inflation rate rose to 8.6 percent in May the hope is the historic numbers will recover sooner rather than later.