WTF is up with the cost of Shingles?

For the first post of my new blog I'm jumping right in mid-stream with issue du Jour for Aaron's Home Repair.

I am in the process of bidding a roof job and I went to a friendly neighborhood roofing supply store to get prices on materials.

Sticker shock is an appropriate description for what I experienced. It corroborated the seemingly unlikely high prices that I saw for shingles at Home Depot the day before.

So what the flyin' freakin' flip-flappin' fudge is up with the price of shingles right now?

I'm looking at $90 a square for good 30-year shingles here in Minneapolis. That's double what it was four years ago. Well ahead of the rate of inflation.

Sure, it's a petroleum-based building material, but the price of oil is down from last year and demand for building materials is WAY down from last year due to fall-off in home construction. I did a roof last year and the price of shingles was probably 30% less then than it is now. Meanwhile the economy is contracting. But shingles are magically more expensive. WTF?

The story I got from the sales guy at the roofing supply store was that asphalt shingles are made from the sludge that's left over from the oil refinement process. True enough so far. Allegedly, the oil refineries have uh, refined their processes in response to high gas prices and have gotten slicker (no pun intended) at extracting every last bit of crude that can be made into gasoline, jet fuel, etc. Therefore, according to the sales guy, the very raw materials available for shingle-making have become scarcer and thus more expensive. Maybe. Or maybe the shingle makers have entered into a handshake deal (collusion, that is) to all raise their prices at the same time. Gotta wonder.