Get Cheaper Petrol by Choice
Years ago I used to have free petrol, for business and personal use, along with my company car. The cost of petrol was not my concern.
My colleagues would mock me because, despite my having free petrol, I always bought it from the cheapest service station available.
I did not do it to save my company money, saving a halfpenny a litre made next to no difference to the company. I did it to help keep down the price of petrol for everyone.
If everyone did the same and only purchased from the cheapest place the price of petrol would fall (except in the most remote areas). Imagine two petrol stations near to each other and one increases its prices by a halfpenny a litre whilst the other doesn’t. Within moments it would not have any sales.
However many people do not select their petrol on price but on other factors. So the petrol companies take advantage of this and maximise their business needs by increasing their prices.
There is a petrol station just down the road from me which sells petrol at a considerably higher price than another local filling station yet it does a brisk trade. It does not make sense for that station to reduce its prices if it is still getting good custom. If people simply drove past as I do then it would be forced to lower its prices. Clearly the price of petrol does not concern those people.
Today the AA and RAC were saying that we should have stickers on the pumps showing the price of oil and helping people see the gap between the wholesale price of oil and the retail price of petrol. I say that much more important is that the price at the pump should be shown prominently at the entrance to the petrol station and that it should always match the price on the pump. This should be vigorously enforced by trading standards.
In any case, driving considerately, carefully and calmly saves far more money than the price of petrol alone.
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Comments
Not sure that's a Good Idea.
Not sure that's a Good Idea. After a little while we'd find that the only petrol stations left open were those at the big out-of-town supermarkets who often sell petrol at a loss to get people to visit their stores. Smaller fuel-only stations would close, and queues at the remaining ones could get very long.
Location and availability of filling stations is more important to most people than price. If you can fill up quickly on the route to work, you'll be happy to pay perhaps 10% more for that than having to drive by a longer route and queue for half an hour at Tescos.
Motoring is still as cheap, in real terms, as it has ever been. Oil prices only recently peaked at about the same level, in real terms, as they were in the 1970s. Thanks to the "credit crunch" prices have dropped as global demand has fallen, but they will rise again.
Filling Stations
A number of people emailed me in defence of the local filling station.
I am not talking about rural areas where filling stations are few and far between. I was talking about where most people live - in towns. One in six people in England live in London alone and three quarters live in conurbations. Therefore in the course of a week they pass many filling stations.
Also a number of people emailed puzzled as to why I was encouraging people to bring down the price of petrol. Surely, I wanted petrol prices to go up? Isn’t that what the ETA is about?
I have never said, and I do not want, petrol prices to go up. As motorists we should pay our way. That means paying the full cost of motoring – pollution, safety, health and global warming etc as well as paying for the maintenance and building of roads and bridges. If that means that petrol prices go up then so be it. That does not mean that I want them to go up. It could be that in future, even if motorists paid all their external costs, the cost of motoring could come down. Who knows?
Balance to be struck
You are correct their is always a balance to be struck on almost any issue.
Where I would disagree with you is that I would say that motoring is not just as cheap as in the past but a lot cheaper. The cost of buying a car takes fewer days income for a typical person in Britain now than when compared to the seventies.