Oil market pushes up paint prices

Decorators are fond of saying that the cheapest way to jazz up a room is to repaint it. But that interior design trick has been getting a bit more expensive of late.

In the past couple of years, the price of paint across the board, from the least costly to top-of-the-line brands, has been climbing.

The chief culprit is petroleum, its byproducts and other raw and manufactured materials critical to the paint industry. The price of crude oil is up more than 25 percent since last July and has nearly tripled since July 2000. With the price now above $75 a barrel, and with gasoline at the pump well over $3 a gallon, there is no telling when, or if, paint prices will come down, industry experts say.

The increase covers “transportation costs, natural gas at the refineries that make the pigments, steel that is used for containers,” says Casey McCormick, president of Maryland-based McCormick Paints. “We use a lot of plastics for containers, which have also skyrocketed. And the resins that go into paint manufacturing have, over the last 18 months, gone up quite a few times.”

Since 2004, his company has raised prices “a couple of bucks a gallon” on a wide range of products. A gallon of the least expensive flat latex wall paint now retails for $21.60, while the priciest “scrubbable” finish costs $35.05.

Regardless of price or quality, virtually all paint has the same petroleum-derived “basic recipe — resins, solvents and pigments,” says Steve Sides, vice president of the National Paint and Coatings Association in Washington. And prices for all of those components are rising.

“You need enough resin to give you a nice film, enough pigment to hide the surface, and those expensive additives to prevent a drippy, runny or spattery finish,” Sides says. “Cheaper paint is a compromise on all those things in order to give you a price point.”

Even water-based latex paint – which accounts for nearly 75 percent of the residential market and has largely replaced oil-based paint to meet government air-quality standards – contains oil-derived ingredients “to help hold it all together,” he adds.

Once the paint has been made, it must be moved to market, usually in trucks guzzling gasoline or diesel. Those costs also figure into the final price.

So do merchants’ operating costs – air conditioning, heating, lighting, rent – that are passed on to consumers, says Eileen McComb, communications director for Benjamin Moore, which has a nationwide network of independently owned stores. “Every time our retailers open their doors and turn the lights on, they have an increase in overhead.”

After several years of holding the line, Behr – whose paints are widely available at Home Depot stores – has raised its prices, says spokeswoman Tiffany Campbell. “It used to be $18.97 to $24.97 a gallon, depending on the finish, but this year it’s $19.98 to $26.98,” she says. “Behr is trying to watch out for our customers, but we don’t have total control.”

The decision to pass on costs to consumers is never easy and often resisted, according to Stephen Byrne of Lucite International, a British coatings manufacturer.

Large do-it-yourself chains “wield great power in the pricing stakes and constantly look to others to absorb any excesses,” he wrote late last year in Polymers Paint Colour Journal, a trade publication. Such chains “are also persistent in their argument to suppliers that consumers simply will not accept higher prices.”

Things are no better for independent vendors.

“For the last two years, we have had rising prices of 5 to 10 percent a year,” says Bill Thornton, owner of Virginia’s Alexandria Paint Co. and Arlington Paint and Decorating Center. Contractor-grade Benjamin Moore paint that sold for about $17 a gallon in 2004 is now up to $19 a gallon, while Fine Paints of Europe, a brand imported from the Netherlands, has climbed from about $85 a gallon to $95, he says.

Some solace: Even with the increases, says Thornton, “paint is still the least expensive way to transform a room.”