Columnist Susan Snyder: Doing some comparison shopping

Friday, March 7, 2003 | 9:22 a.m.

Susan Snyder's column appears Mondays, Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Reach her at snyder@lasvegassun.com or (702) 259-4082.

More amazing than a $2.09 gallon of gasoline is what a $2.09 gallon of gasoline does to people.

Two of my coworkers, for instance, resorted to using the c-word aloud in the office.

"Gas is getting so expensive I'm starting to think we ought to carpool," one said to the other.

Holy octane! We can't carpool. This is Las Vegas, where U.S. Census figures show that 75 percent of us drive alone to work in our private vehicles. Shoot, we're almost first at something. We can't afford to go screwing it up.

Or maybe we can afford it. According to a scientific study of items found in the Sun's employee break-room vending machines, a can of Diet Coke costs 50 cents, so a gallon would cost us $5.33. (We can't include cans of Diet Pepsi because they sit in a row that's been stuck since the machines were installed.)

Diet Snapple, which tastes like it came from a gas pump, costs $1.25 for 16 ounces or $10 a gallon. And a gallon of Campbell's Soup in Hand (creamy chicken) would cost $29.75.

Ten gallons of the soup would cover one payment on a Ford Focus ZX3, and it would taste better. As the owner of a Focus, I figure it's only a matter of a few more recall notices before I won't have to bother putting any more gas into the tank.

It probably would do better filled with peat and tulips.

Whether or not you use it for carpooling, a national survey says 37 percent of you park a pickup in your driveway.

And despite all the recent national publicity about how America's roads are overrun by all those bad old sport-utility vehicles, the survey says only about 24 million or 12 percent of the nation's 204 million vehicles are SUVs.

Maybe it just seems there are more. Or maybe it only seems there are more when the drivers act like Satan.

Anyway, the study says American households have 1.9 vehicles on average (a Focus, for example, counts as .9 of a vehicle). Only 8 percent of people in households surveyed said they don't own any motor vehicles, while 61 percent of Americans said they own two or more.

Another 18 million vehicle owners (9 percent of those polled) own minivans, obviously unaware that minivans have not been, nor will they ever be, cool.

Don't bother writing and ranting. I'm too busy making origami farm animals from all my Focus recall notices.

Nantucket Nectar Gatorade costs $1.25 for 16 ounces, or $10 a gallon. And a gallon of Welch's grape juice not only costs a whopping $19.20, but you'd have to open 32 of those teeny 4-ounce cans to even get a gallon.

A camel uses no gasoline and can go months without water, if you don't strain him too much.

They regurgitate and re-chew ingested forage too, which means you don't have to fill them up as often.

And they come from desert climates. You know, like from the Middle East.

Oh. Right.

That's how we we got into this whole expensive gas mess in the first place.

Well, buy a bus pass.

And a really good, really long book.