Originally Posted by Chris142
Originally Posted by PPWarrior
My O'reilly has many of those. Almost noone buys oil there because they are double walmart's and other part store prices. Weird.
Same here. I never get oil from O'Riley's as they are 2x everyone else. I asked the commercial manager why their oil is so high and he told me that they are in the parts business,not the oil business..
A lot of the time when you go to Walmart you don't just buy one quart or jug of oil. Perhaps you go grocery shopping or Christmas shopping or whatever while you are there. All they do is ring up the oil just like any other transaction at the register. So it costs them nothing in terms of staffing to sell you that oil.
At the parts store, it's different. many people don't know what they need or how to add the oil. First they come up to the counter and ask what oil they need - so we spend time looking it up in the computer. Then they either go get it or we go get it for them. Most of the time people say "I don't care" when I ask them if they have any brand preference. They end up with the store brand oil which is the cheapest. Sometimes, it turns into a 3 minute discussion about different brands, synthetic vs conventional, high mileage vs regular, etc. Then, they either buy a small funnel (yay, we make $1 here because it probably costs the company $0.09 to get one and we sell them for $1.09) or they ask us for help putting it in because they don't know how to do it. So we use up one or two sections of a roll of shop towels that we have for store use. All in all, think about how much time and effort we just went through to sell one quart of oil.
Now, if we're talking 5-quart jugs, there are always deals to be had. Store brand conventional 5 quart jug + entry-level oil filter is $22 at my store. Name brand synthetic + Wix filter is usually about $33. Could you get the oil cheaper at Walmart and buy the filter on Amazon and save another few bucks? Of course! But when the closest Walmart is a 30+ minute drive it's silly.
I do agree that the retail price for most oils at parts stores is ridiculous... $45 for a jug of Mobil1? LOL! But it's on sale about 50% of the time for $28.95 which isn't bad. Sure, Walmart has it for $26.68 right now and it's like $23 sometimes, but at the end of the day Walmart probably doesn't make any money on that oil. If you buy some cereal, milk, a 6-pack of your favorite beer, some pasta, maybe a random holiday decoration or a blanket or a pair of shorts or whatever random stuff people buy at Walmart and then a soda from the machine while you wait to check out, Walmart just profited on you big time despite breaking even or losing money on the oil.