{"id":152892,"date":"2026-03-31T02:41:08","date_gmt":"2026-03-31T02:41:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/152892\/"},"modified":"2026-03-31T02:41:08","modified_gmt":"2026-03-31T02:41:08","slug":"pain-at-the-pump-rising-gas-prices-affect-businesses-lehigh-valley-regional-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/152892\/","title":{"rendered":"Pain at the pump: Rising gas prices affect businesses | Lehigh Valley Regional News"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The average price of regular gas in Pennsylvania is ringing in at just under $4 per gallon. Drivers are certainly being hit hard, but so are some businesses.<\/p>\n<p>Gas prices are holding steady at high numbers.<\/p>\n<p>According to AAA, the national gas average has jumped $1 in one month.<\/p>\n<p>Local businesses say they&#8217;re taking notice.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Customers don&#8217;t (want to) come out because they&#8217;re getting hit with the cost of gas, you know, it&#8217;s hard,&#8221; says Gerry Coppola, owner of The Crust Pizzeria and Restaurant in Allentown.<\/p>\n<p>Coppola says in addition to impacting customers, the rising cost of fuel is also impacting how expensive ingredients are.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s a concern because it drives products up, it drives costs up, you got tractor-trailers driving all over the place,&#8221; says Coppola.<\/p>\n<p>Meanwhile at Schuler Service, their crews are driving their 23 vehicles around the Lehigh Valley for plumbing repairs.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;We have on any given week maybe 50 service calls that we&#8217;re out to for homes around the Lehigh Valley,&#8221; says Joe Mrochko, vice president of Schuler Service.<\/p>\n<p>The local business uses a small company to supply its gas.<\/p>\n<p>So Mrochko says the price at the pump isn&#8217;t an issue, but some of their vendors are tacking on fuel stipends.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;We&#8217;re hoping that the impact will be minimal, and our hope is that prices will resume to a more normal or maybe even go down as the trend that they were on before all this,&#8221; says Mrochko.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The average price of regular gas in Pennsylvania is ringing in at just under $4 per gallon. Drivers&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":152893,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[214,119,121,120,60,805],"class_list":["post-152892","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-allentown","tag-_homepage_top_stories","tag-allentown","tag-allentown-headlines","tag-allentown-news","tag-business","tag-lehighvalley"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152892","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=152892"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152892\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/152893"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=152892"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=152892"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=152892"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}