From their facebook page:
"We're cutting the price of petrol again from tomorrow morning - the fourth drop in four weeks - to 132.7p per litre for unleaded and 137.7p a litre for diesel."
I get 4p off a litre with my BP fuel card but with this ASDA are still 2p cheaper in my area. Good on them I say, dont see many moves like this anywhere else.
No asda petrol stations near me so it's not worth the trip :-(
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To think I just filled up at Tesco too, but then again I use the clubcard points x4 so it works out much better anyway I'm sure.
I think I heard that Morissons are reducing their prices as well, hopefully this kicks off big style and we get a nice chunk off our petrol/diesel bills, I know I could do with it!
They've got very little control over prices in reality - the margin they can make at the pumps is tiny - a small rise in wholesale prices and any cuts will be wiped out.
Yeah, they can't really use fuel as a loss leader like alcohol as it won't necessarily get people in the store and I could see it quickly bankrupting even the largest retailers.
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They're just finally dropping the prices back down to near where they were before the "fuel crisis". Took them long enough.
Quote from: zpyder on May 16, 2012, 20:57:22 PM
They're just finally dropping the prices back down to near where they were before the "fuel crisis". Took them long enough.
Its got very little to do with them... movement in prices mostly just reflects the wholesale market albeit with some delays.
If you're finding that one supermarket is 3p cheaper than some local branded garage then yes, that 3p difference is the supermarket discounting a bit and relying on a high volume of passing trade. If however you're remembering what prices were a few months ago etc.. and thinking 'finally, they've lowered the prices' then that lowering of prices by any significant amount actually has got very little do do with anyone involved in the retail end of the business its just the reflection of wholesale prices and nor had the previous rise in prices.
One of my co-workers actually owns a garage as an 'investment' - it isn't really much to write home about as far as investments are concerned - he's Asian and so, true to form, has some extended family to work for him in the business which cuts out some of the hassle of hiring a manager & regularly replacing staff etc... even so he barely makes any money from selling petrol - the bulk of the profits come from the shop.
But what about the fact that there was "going to be" a strike, causing mass buying, and as a result garages raking it in by increasing prices by up to 15p a litre more in places. I doubt increasing wholesale prices had anything to do with that price increase, it happened pretty much overnight.
Do you know what the exact price was the day before, the exact price the next day and the price move in the wholesale market? Maybe they did preempt prices slightly - tis irrelevant and likely was a short lived increase in margin (if there even was one). If you consider that you're basing that on your own selective memory and are reliant on a guesstimate as to how much of it was just profiteering on the the part of the retailers then it isn't reliable. FWIW markets are generally quite efficient and whole sale prices move rapidly. The extra margin to be made is likely to be confined to fuel they already own and on the other side they can potentially also take a hit on their margins if/when prices drop suddenly....
You can just look at the figures and see quite clearly that it is a low margin business.
www.ukpia.com/files/pdf/ukpia-briefing-paper-understanding-pump-price.pdf
A margin of 6% doesn't give much room for prices to be moved around by the retailer. Sure a supermarket can take a hit and discount by a few pence - for the independent owners, if the margins were any lower, then they'd might as well not even be running the business in the first place and just keep their cash in the bank/investment fund.
For people who complain about fuel - the main issue with it is the tax... for most of the population of the UK the place you fill up at doesn't have a monopoly and no one is ripping you off - its actually very fairly priced on the part of the supplier.
I appreciate that it's low margin, and mostly tax.
I don't see how it isn't possible though that they could decide to increase that margin temporarily for a month or two though.
My "selective memory" is that near the end of march, just before I went to Portugal for a week, petrol was selling at 136.9 pretty much everywhere around me. One week later it was 148.9 pretty much everywhere. In my 10 years of driving, when taxes and wholesale prices have gone up, the price at the pumps has gone up a couple of pence at most. Similarly when the taxes have gone down, they have dropped a penny or two (half the time when it's been reported that wholesale prices would drop, this hasn't been reflected in the price at the pumps here though).
The fact that now locally the prices have dropped back to near where they were at the end of march suggest the last few months it's not been a tax thing, and IMHO not a wholesale thing (the strike I thought would only effect the garages supply from the depot, so wholesale wouldn't have hiked the price due to their own supply issues).
It was hardly selective memory on Zpyder's part.
A quick look around at the time and many websites/papers were reporting price hikes due to profiteering, it was announced that everyone should panic buy and garage forecourts started bumping their prices, and funnily enough others kept the prices the same, so how do you figure that out, were those that kept prices the same selling at a loss?
I would imagine that living in London you don't follow the prices too keenly Dave, there was definitely massive overnight hikes that I wouldn't say could be explained so honestly. Now I can imagine this being foresight to the wholesalers charging the forecourts more on their next delivery, however many of those hiking the prices were not even the ones out of fuel (most of the garages by me we're shut up after selling out at the usual price).
If it was that tough for the forecourts and hardly profitable I'm sure we'd see a lot less of them rather than the saturation that we do have.
137.7 here
137.9 at teso + clubcard points
Quote from: Eggtastico on May 18, 2012, 19:20:53 PM
137.7 here
137.9 at teso + clubcard points
I'm surprised at that ...
Quote from: http://your.asda.com/news-and-blogs/we-re-cutting-another-2p-off-the-price-of-petrol-and-dieselFrom tomorrow you'll pay no more than 132.7p for a litre of unleaded and 137.7p per litre of diesel at any of our 196 Asda filling stations. It means we've been able to reduce the price of fuel by 8p in the last four weeks.
no ASDA's around here, but Tesco Abingdon is down to 132.9 from 138.9 a week or so ago
Quote from: Bacon on May 17, 2012, 15:31:57 PM
It was hardly selective memory on Zpyder's part.
A quick look around at the time and many websites/papers were reporting price hikes due to profiteering, it was announced that everyone should panic buy and garage forecourts started bumping their prices, and funnily enough others kept the prices the same, so how do you figure that out, were those that kept prices the same selling at a loss?
well it is really... does he remember all the individual price changes throughout the year or just the sudden ones that affect him in a negative way...
looking at the actual figures rather than relying on opinions/selective memories of prices being hiked shows its a low margin business
if you're continually selling a product and the wholesale prices rises then you'll raise your prices at the retail end... tis silly not to - so yes they'll have made a larger margin, temporarily, on the product they have but they'll be paying more for subsequent deliveries. Conversely as prices start falling their margins can get squeezed. Overall the next effect of this is a low margin business. I'm more than happy to be proved wrong if anyone wants to visit this thread later and post the 2012 figures... but I'd find it highly unlikely that they're much different to the 2011 figures I've already posted.
@Clock'd 0Ne - the saturation of garages is only going to further increase competition and keep margins down. Sure there's always demand for fuel but there isn't much room to adjust prices.
I remember enough price changes over the last year to know that they only ever went up by 1-3p at a time, not 12p in a week. I've been following the prices fairly closely over the last year due to my car finance being up, and needing to work out what I wanted to do. The 12p hike hit me, because I'd literally just got a new car 2 days before we left and the fuel tank was empty, I remember the prices when we left and what they were when we got back quite vividly as a result.
I suspect we're starting to argue about different things, I'm not talking about gradual increasing of prices via wholesale increases and the occasional drops, I'm talking about just one little blip a little over a month ago, which wasn't caused by supply, but demand (and yes supply could be factored in if you say demand outstripped supply), garages instantly raising their prices to increase their profit, and only just decreasing them some weeks on. Yes some garages will have run out of petrol and so for 24 hours would have lost business, but they were all restocked very quickly down here. It will be interesting to see what the wholesale prices were just before "the event", during, and after, up till now to see if they at all reflect this price change.
Quote from: Dave on May 19, 2012, 14:14:29 PM
Quote from: Bacon on May 17, 2012, 15:31:57 PM
It was hardly selective memory on Zpyder's part.
A quick look around at the time and many websites/papers were reporting price hikes due to profiteering, it was announced that everyone should panic buy and garage forecourts started bumping their prices, and funnily enough others kept the prices the same, so how do you figure that out, were those that kept prices the same selling at a loss?
well it is really... does he remember all the individual price changes throughout the year or just the sudden ones that affect him in a negative way...
looking at the actual figures rather than relying on opinions/selective memories of prices being hiked shows its a low margin business
if you're continually selling a product and the wholesale prices rises then you'll raise your prices at the retail end... tis silly not to - so yes they'll have made a larger margin, temporarily, on the product they have but they'll be paying more for subsequent deliveries. Conversely as prices start falling their margins can get squeezed. Overall the next effect of this is a low margin business. I'm more than happy to be proved wrong if anyone wants to visit this thread later and post the 2012 figures... but I'd find it highly unlikely that they're much different to the 2011 figures I've already posted.
@Clock'd 0Ne - the saturation of garages is only going to further increase competition and keep margins down. Sure there's always demand for fuel but there isn't much room to adjust prices.
You still didn't answer my question Dave.
Some of us are on the road daily, i myself was doing 1500+ miles a week at that point, do you know how often i fill up and how many garages i see on my daily route? And you were where, sat in an office? :dunno:
Quote from: addictweb on May 18, 2012, 19:47:52 PM
Quote from: Eggtastico on May 18, 2012, 19:20:53 PM
137.7 here
137.9 at teso + clubcard points
I'm surprised at that ...
Quote from: http://your.asda.com/news-and-blogs/we-re-cutting-another-2p-off-the-price-of-petrol-and-dieselFrom tomorrow you'll pay no more than 132.7p for a litre of unleaded and 137.7p per litre of diesel at any of our 196 Asda filling stations. It means we've been able to reduce the price of fuel by 8p in the last four weeks.
i drive diesel :oD 60mpg 'o)