PETROL PRICES - A MUST READ!!!

[Polly]

Subject: Fw: Price of Petrol

This is serious, read on........and pass it round

 

Subject: Fw: Price of Petrol

 

This is about PETROL PRICES so Join the resistance!!!!

I hear we are going to hit close to 89p a litre by the summer.

Want petrol prices to come down? We need to take some intelligent,

united action.Phillip Hollsworth, in the USA, offered this good idea: This makes MUCH

MORE SENSE than the "don't buy petrol on a certain day" campaign that

was going around last April or May! The oil companies just laughed at that

because they knew we wouldn't continue to "hurt" ourselves by refusing

to buy petrol. It was more of an inconvenience to us than it was a problem

for them. BUT, whoever thought of this idea, has come up with a plan that can

really work. Please read it and join with us! By now you're probably thinking petrol priced at about 77p a litre is

super cheap. Me too! It is currently 79p - 83p for regular unleaded in

some towns.

Now that the oil companies and the OPEC nations have conditioned us to

think that the cost of a litre is CHEAP at 77p -80p, we need to take

aggressive action to teach them that BUYERS control the marketplace....

not sellers.

With the price of petrol going up more each day, we consumers need to

take action. The only way we are going to see the price of petrol come

down is if we hit someone in the pocket by not purchasing their Petrol! And

we can do that WITHOUT hurting ourselves.

How?

Since we all rely on our cars, we can't just stop buying petrol. But we

CAN have an impact on petrol prices if we all act together to force a

price war.

 

Here's the idea:

For the rest of this year, DON"T purchase ANY petrol from the two

biggest oil companies (which now are one), ESSO and BP. If they are not

selling any petrol, they will be inclined to reduce their prices. If

they reduce their prices, the other companies will have to follow suit.

But

to have an impact, we need to reach literally millions of Esso and BP

petrol buyers. It's really simple to do!! Now, don't whimp out on me at

this point...keep reading and I'll explain how simple it is to reach

millions of people!!

 

I am sending this note to about thirty people. If each of you send it

to at least ten more (30 x 10 = 300)... and those 300 send it to at

least ten more (300 x 10 = 3,000) ... and so on, by the time the message

reaches the sixth generation of people, we will have reached over THREE

MILLION consumers!

If those three million get excited and pass this on to ten friends each,

then 30 million people will have been contacted! If it goes one level

further, you guessed it..... THREE HUNDRED MILLION PEOPLE!!!

Again, all You have to do is send this to 10 people. That's all. (If you

don't understand how we can reach 300 million and all you have to do is

send this to 10 people.... well, let's face it, you just aren't a

mathematician. But I am... so trust me on this one.)

 

How long would all that take? If each of us sends this email out to ten

more people within one day of receipt, all 300 MILLION people could

conceivably be contacted within the next 8 days!!! I'll bet you didn't

think you and I had that much potential, did you! Acting together we can

make a difference.

If this makes sense to you, please pass this message on.

 

PLEASE HOLD OUT UNTIL THEY LOWER THEIR PRICES TO THE 69p a LITRE RANGE

AND KEEP THEM DOWN. THIS CAN REALLY WORK.

 

Cheers

 

 

Steve Burton

[bitsbobs]

One of my friends had a garage closed down for investigations a few years ago. It was something like 65p a litre, so he put in exactly 10 litres and the price was £6.51

[davidP]

This is all very well, but it's blaming the wrong people. Petrol companies make very little money from petrol sales & UK petrol is in fact the cheapest in Europe. Shell has stated that it has made no profit on UK petrol sales for 3 years. Yes, as companies they make big profits, but it's not from petrol sales and I suspect that many of them would secretly love to give up petrol sales in the UK.

Nope, next time you fill your tank consider that somewhere in the region of 75% of what you're paying is going directly to the Chancellor in Duty & VAT. Petrol prices at the moment are about 13p per litre down from their peak and how much of that is due to the the Chancellor? None!

The petrol company and retailer are bringing you petrol at less than 20p per litre (cheaper than America). It's only the tax that brings it up to the unreasonable price it is today.

 

The Government must be absolutely delighted that campaigns like this are deflecting the blame from them to the petrol companies. No doubt they'll slip another tax rise through and then sit back contentedly counting their money whilst the petrol companies once again take the blame!

[chesters1]

i agree with davidp its the government tax that is the crippler ,remember even the us buys its oil at the going rate but their taxes are less (blame that price fixing of opec for the starting price) maybe the uk and the us should buy their oil from russia,unfortunatly the tax would remain on ours.

on the same vein people moan about the profits of the national lottery ,its just pence per ticket ,the state gets a large lump of that £1 for doing nothing.

[Chris Playle]

I agree with you on this one Chesters1. The Government is definitely to blame on many things relating to the price of everyday items.

 

We all pay through the nose for the most basic items we use everyday. The Taxes levvied on just about every item we buy is higher than most European countries yet we have the worst services in the EU. The education systems is laughable. The teachers do a good job but they are stretched to the limit by increasing cutbacks from LEAs. The NHS is falling to bits. The Doctors and Nurses try their best but have very little to work with. The roads in the UK are the worst in Europe. Road congestion is at it's worst. You would have thought that with all the VAT and Duty on Fuel and the high road Tax we pay that we would have the best roads in the world.

 

So, where does all the tax I pay actually go? Since I am paying it, I have a right to know where it goes don't I?

 

I agree that fuel prices are high. As a company car driver you notice the difference in change even when it's just a few pence. We have even had to concentrate our work around a 50 mile radius if the head office to keep costs down. We used to cover from Birmingham to Newcastle. The cost of fuel has risen so much that the company I work for even concidered charging non-contract customers a mileage rate to attend to jobs. This doesn't suit the customers. The company foots the bill for alot of petrol over the course of the year.

 

Have you also noticed that the price of LPG is also creaping up as more people convert their cars to using it??

 

The only way to get fuel prices down is to make it a priority on the agenda at the next general election. Hitting the petrol companies is not the way to go about it. Contacting you local MP and writing on-mass and telling them that fuel prices are a priority issue might get a better result. If enough people write they'll have to take notice. They may drop the price of fuel before the election. But if they put the price back up again after, remind them at the next election and use your vote to get the outcome you desire.

 

Tight Lines

 

Chris

[chesters1]

i am always concerned with joining the euro ,the pound will have to be devalued ,any remaining gold in our reserves (we sold a lot last year)will go to brussels ,does mr blair want us to join the euro but still be taxed at uk levels ,if our petrol ,tobbacco ,wine etc etc etc were at euro levels then the government take on these things would fall dramaticly

he could claw some back with tax hikes UP to euro levels but the money spinners mentioned would be gone

i see a dark future looming for the uk if we join.

[Newt]

Re: the "high taxes and where does the money go"

 

Don't you folks have a huge number of "social" programs operated by the government? Health care, basic living expenses for those unemployed, etc.?

 

Governments are known to be horrible at running programs. Much less efficient than any private company could be and survive. Tremendous percentage of funds go to "administrative overhead" and just seems to vanish without having done any obvious work.

 

Easy enough to say "Well, the government needs to take care of that" but expect to pay for it.

 

And pay more if the national government runs a program than if a local one does.

 

I know the above is somewhat simplistic but I think it is also quite accurate. Look at the various Soviet (as they were) countries where the government was in charge of providing almost everything and "free" too.

[davidP]

Aside from petrol taxes, Britons labour under the impression that they are highly taxed. The reality is however that certainly within Europe we are one of the lowest taxed countries. Much is said about the state of the health services in other countries compared to the UK yet the reality is that the people pay far more to support these services than we do.

As an example, my sister moved to Ireland and discovered that she had to pay the highest rate tax (40%) as soon as she went over about £20K which hardly puts her amongst the highest earners. Even The USA is higher taxed than most people realise because they pay income tax at both State and National level, although I'm not sure what the rates are. Perhaps one of our US friends would care to enlighten us.

[pinky]

i think you will find it is about 85% tax!!!

[Paul_H]

Have to agree about the tax situation on fuel, but at the same time don't feel sorry for the petrol companies (as opposed to forecourt operators) they might only make a small profit on a per litre basis, but when you start dealing with the quantities they are that is all they need to make. Also as they buy the Petrol from themselves it is fairly easy to ensure that the petrol supplier part doesn't make much of a profit.

 

I have worked as a manager, cashier, all sorts for a number of petrol stations over the years and one thing that always amazes me is the way people in the UK, fill their car up with petrol and then go and complain to the cashier about it.

Why oh Why didn't they just not fill their car up and go elsewere for their fuel. It would work to lower prices.

 

The way it works with Petrol Company owned/contracted stations (as opposed to independants) is that every petrol station will have one or two petrol stations which they match on price, every day the oil company phones you up and asks what price your competitor(s) is charging they then base the price they are charging you to buy fuel at based on that price, the site basically will normally always make a fixed 1p to 4p per litre (depending on your agreement with the petrol company) so if your competitor site has put their price up by 1p per litre the petrol company will put their price to you as the retailer up by 1p basically forcing you to put your price up by 1p to maintain your margin. If an opposition site has lowered their price then the petrol company will normally lower your buying price to allow you to match your competitor.(This doesn't always occur straight away but once your sales volume start to drop, it happens, as they also have targets to meet for sales)

 

If everybody instantly stopped buying petrol from the garage which charges more the first thing the retailer will have to do is cancel the next days tanker delivery, which immediately hits the petrol company were it hurts and virtually always results in them lowering the price again, but if sales aren't affected by the following day your opposition sites will have matched your new higher price and so the price locally has risen and will stay there.

 

That is why fuel prices on a local scale are virtually always identical but on a regional basis vary, within 20 miles of me a major retailer is charging between 74.9 and 78.9 per litre depending on which of their sites you visit. The price locally of 74.9 I know is changing tomorrow morning to 75.9 and has done already on the sites on the outskirts of the town.

 

I have seen it work in Canada were the price in a petrol station may be a couple of cents more than their competitors first thing in the morning, that site will be empty and the competitor site will be full, by midday the expensive site will have lowered its prices (quite often to below the competitors) and that site will now be packed and the other now expensive one will be empty. The price literally will go up and down every day because people shop around whereas in this country, we don't (well rarely) change our buying habits the price only ever goes one way. UP.

 

[ 10 May 2002, 02:38 PM: Message edited by: Paul_H ]