Gas prices in Southern Alberta rose by an average of 10 cents a litre last week, but prices should now stabilize for the rest of the month.

While the Easter Long Weekend is partially to blame for the sudden jump, it looks like prices wont be changing much anytime soon.

Senior Petroleum Analyst for GasBuddy.com Dan McTeague says the rise in costs is mostly companies recovering retail margins.

"Of course it was a long weekend so the prices went up, but there's nothing on the refinery side that drove prices up. It was a really good deal last week in southern Alberta to buy gasoline for $0.98 cents a litre because it was costing the gas stations $0.98 cents a litre to buy it. So what we saw over the week was a restoration of the retail margin, the operating line which gas stations need to pay for things like taxes, overhead, and pay their employees."

He says many gas stations are competing with others and shed those margins occasionally as some big box stores are offering gasoline at the cost of which they buy it.

"This is called a loss leader, it brings people into the store to buy other things to recover that cost. Not everybody can operate that way, and that model if it goes on too long as it did in Southern Alberta, over several days you start to lose money, at some point somebody is going to have to come up for air, throw the towel in and restore those prices."

McTeague shares there is nothing happening on the markets that could upset the current price of gasoline for the forseeable future.

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