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March 17, 2008
Bringing down the Price of Gas
In Reply to a Chain Email Letter about not buying from ExxonMobil to help bring down the cost of gas:
Gasoline Market Share in California
According to a 2006 Market Share chart of Gasoline in California, Exxon/Mobil had only a 6% market share. Assuming that hasn't changed too much in the past two years, and that this percentage extends across the US, we can determine that if this email reached the 3 million people it was supposed to, only 180,000 people of those people would actually be using Exxon/Mobil and be able to make a difference.
Lets now stop assuming and stick with California. If by some chance those 3 million people reached ALL lived in California and those 180,000 people ALL switched to something else besides Exxon/Mobil, then going off the number of registered drivers in California we can calculate a 13% drop in total sales for Exxon. Again thats only IF all 3 million people lived in California and IF they all decided to stop buying Exxon.
So to make this really work first we figure out how many of the 196 million drivers use Exxon. Lets be nice and say they do 10% of all the gasoline sales in the US. That means 19.6 Million people use Exxon. Now we decide how many would it take to really make a difference. I'd say 10% would be pretty noticeable and make them take action. So that means 1.96 Million people would have to stop using Exxon. And since we can't knowingly contact just Exxon users we have to let everyone know. And if only 10% of everyone uses Exxon then we are back to having to get in touch with 19.6 Million drivers.
Now this guy talks about reaching 300 million people assuming that everyone who gets it sends it out to 10 people who havent already got it. But how many people simply delete spam and not send it? And how many people send it to people that have already got it?
Chain Letters and Pyramid Schemes
According to a website by Chip Denman, only about 1 in 20 in his example sent out chain letters. If we apply that here and say only 1 of the 10 recipients will send out a rely we can see that this email will never really reach the 300 million it hopes.
Simply put this kind of tactic while sounding good is extremely hard to put into practice. This would have to be accounced on TV or sometihng to get any real change going.