(FORTUNE Small Business) – Most folks get the morning paper and check out the front page, the comics, or the sports section. Not me. I flip to the business pages and rustle through until I find the listings for natural gas prices. Very often these days my morning mood, good cup of coffee or not, depends on whether prices have risen (usually) or fallen (not often enough).

My wife finds my daily obsession with natural gas pricing amusing for a guy who until recently didn't even know where to find the commodity tables. But I know I'm not the only businessperson poring over them. In the past few months skyrocketing prices for energy, lumber, steel, and other metals have gouged margins for a wide array of small businesses. Reading the tables each morning equips me to battle salespeople looking to hike my prices based on some movement in the natural gas market.

Why natural gas? Chemical companies such as Dow and Exxon Mobil use it to make the resin that my family-owned company needs to manufacture plastic bags. As the price of natural gas has doubled over the past two years--jumping almost 40% in one recent month--my raw-material costs have marched right alongside. Resin and the resulting plastic accounts for about 35% of my total product cost. Since natural gas began its climb, what I pay for resin has jumped 55%. And because my company uses natural gas to run much of our machinery, our utility bills have spiraled up as well.

In the old days we would just have passed on price hikes. Not anymore. Many customers, especially those under contract with big retailers such as Wal-Mart, can't boost their prices, so they won't accept increases in mine. Then there's the overseas competition. Chinese bag manufacturers buy their resin from the Mideast, where natural gas prices are a fraction of ours. So far those producers can't sell their cheaper resin here because there's no easy way to deliver it.

Meanwhile, I'm casting about for new solutions. More and more I'm outsourcing production of my plastic, and I've been able to buy it at several percentage points below my production cost on some items. Like many U.S. manufacturers, I'm also looking overseas. I've begun to study producing in China, where raw material is less expensive and where I won't be saddled with California's high electricity and workers' compensation costs. Mexico could make sense, but raw material is more expensive there. I'm also working to cut the consumption of natural gas in my factory.

Still, little guys like me look at commodity prices and wonder how we can slug it out. Former journalist that I am, I figure information can't hurt. Each day I visit the commodities section of the CNN-Money website to find out where gas is trading. Every Thursday, I look over the federal government's report on weekly gas storage and usage. "Don't you know gas pricing is down 50 cents per million BTUs [that's British thermal units], and storage is 22% above last year?" I've said to my suppliers to fight off their proposed price increases.

But that argument doesn't work often enough. I can tell because plastic, as a percentage of total costs, has risen around 10% in the past two years. While I work on solutions, I pray that prices collapse. That's not entirely out of the question. We're going to finish the winter heating season with natural gas inventories almost 20% above last year's, and expectations are bullish for restocking during the summer. See, I really do know too much about this stuff. In fact, even if my problem somehow goes away, I'm utterly convinced that box scores will never hold quite the same allure for me.