I Drive Gas and Have an EV. What That Taught Me About Marketing in Central Oregon

Two Vehicles, Two Very Different Cost Structures

I own a gas truck and an electric vehicle. Both get driven regularly in Bend. The truck handles highway runs and the things a truck is made for here in Central Oregon. The EV takes care of the daily driving: errands, short trips across town, the routine stuff.

The cost difference is hard to ignore. At current Bend gas prices, the truck runs me around $0.17 per mile in fuel. The EV runs about $0.05. Over a full year of driving, that gap works out to somewhere between $1,500 and $2,300 in fuel savings, depending on how much highway miles the truck racks up.

I'm not making a case for anyone to go buy an electric vehicle. The upfront cost is real, and it doesn't work for every situation or every budget. But watching those two fuel numbers side by side every week started making me think about cost structures more broadly. Specifically: what are businesses in Central Oregon still paying for because they've always paid for it, and not because it's working?

$5 Gas Changes the Math for Everyone, Not Just Drivers

Bend gas prices topped $5 per gallon in 2026 and stayed there. In late April the average in Bend sat at $5.04. Oregon's statewide average hit $5.35. Some of that is seasonal blend costs, some is global supply pressure from ongoing tensions, and some is just the geographic reality of being inland in the Pacific Northwest, far from the nearest refinery.

For a consumer sitting at a pump watching the total click up, it's a grocery budget decision. For a business that runs deliveries, keeps a van on the road, or has someone covering the Redmond-to-Sunriver corridor for sales calls, it's a line item that didn't look this bad two years ago. The cost of physically moving things and people across Central Oregon has gone up and isn't coming down meaningfully before 2027.

That matters for marketing too, even if the connection isn't obvious at first. When fuel costs rise, the threshold for what a business is willing to spend to reach a new customer changes. The question stops being "what can we afford?" and starts being "what can we prove is working?"

Customer Acquisition Has Its Own Inflation Problem

Fuel isn't the only thing that costs more to move. Getting a new customer costs more too.

Customer acquisition costs have risen 222% over the last eight years. In 2025 alone they went up another 18.4%. Digital advertising, which a lot of local businesses turned to as an alternative to print, followed the same curve. Pay-per-click costs climbed roughly 20% year over year in several categories, and that trend hasn't reversed going into 2026.

The businesses holding the line on acquisition costs are the ones that built direct relationships with customers instead of renting attention from Google or Meta every time they wanted someone in the door. That's already in the data. Companies with mature first-party customer data report 34% lower acquisition costs than those still dependent on third-party platform targeting.

Most local businesses in Bend don't have that. They have a Facebook page and maybe a somewhat active Instagram profile. That's not a criticism of anyone. It's where the tools available to small businesses led them. But it's also why the cost of reaching a new customer keeps climbing without a clear ceiling.

Where Bend Shoppers Are Cutting Back

The conversation in Bend has shifted. People who moved here in 2020 because it felt affordable are working with a very different set of numbers now.

Cost of living here is 12% above the national average and 22% above the Oregon state average. A family-sized rental starts at $2,600 a month on the Westside and goes up from there. Median home prices are sitting around $630,000 to $700,000. At one point Bend had the fourth-fastest cost of living increase in the country.

I watched this happen in real time. When I got here in 2020, groceries felt manageable, utilities were modest, and going out to eat didn't require much mental math. That's not 2026. Nationally, 86% of consumers say they've changed their spending habits this year. Forty-two percent have switched to cheaper grocery options. Those aren't abstract survey numbers. That’s the person in line ahead of you at Natural Grocers, Whole Foods, or Fred Meyer.

When people are making hard trade-offs on the basics, they don't stop spending at local businesses entirely. They get more deliberate about it. A well-timed offer from a place they already like? That still lands. A mailer they didn't sign up for? That goes straight into recycling.

What I Think Happens Going Into 2027

Here's what I'm expecting, and I'll be direct about it.

Gas prices in Central Oregon are not going to drop significantly. There's too much structural cost baked into the price at a Bend pump: global market pricing, Oregon's fuel standards, and the distance from refinery infrastructure. The $4 gas of 2020 isn't coming back on any timeline that helps anyone in the short term.

Customer acquisition costs in digital channels are going to keep rising. Attention is finite, the number of businesses bidding for it keeps growing, and there's no obvious mechanism that reverses that. Businesses still relying on paid digital reach as their primary acquisition strategy are going to keep paying more per result while the returns stay flat or decline.

Consumer discretionary spending is going to stay under pressure, especially for households in the middle of the income range. The people adjusting their grocery budget are not going to start responding to expensive, generic marketing. What they'll respond to is relevant, local, and easy to act on.

I also think 2027 is the year a meaningful number of Central Oregon businesses stop writing checks for coupon books sent via mail and print inserts they can't measure, and start asking harder questions about what they're getting. Digital coupon use in the US has already hit 169 million users annually. Print coupon redemption rates are running around 5%. The shift is underway. The businesses that get ahead of it are going to be in a better position than those that wait until the print vendors start disappearing.

Where Local Coupons Fits Into This

Local Coupons isn't a print campaign with a digital wrapper on it. It's built for the way people in places like Bend currently make decisions about where to spend.

Businesses on the platform don't pay to reach a broad audience and hope some portion of it is nearby and interested. They reach people who are in the area and already looking for somewhere specific to spend money. That's a fundamentally different cost structure, and in a market where acquisition costs have tripled over a decade, that difference matters a lot.

For shoppers in Bend, it's practical. When your power bill has doubled and your grocery run costs $100 more than it did a few years ago, a real offer from a local restaurant, a tire shop, or a nail salon you already trust isn't a novelty. It's a reason to choose that place over somewhere else.

The app launches in Bend this summer. If you're running a business and watching your marketing costs climb faster than your revenue, it's worth taking a look. If you live here and shop here, it's free, and the deals come from businesses that are part of this community.