Fuel costs forward

I got this as a forward from a friend of mine, just thought some of you anachists might find this of interest

Mark




We are hitting £1.06 a litre in some areas now, soon we will be faced with paying £1.10 a ltr. Philip Hollsworth 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!


We need to take aggressive action to teach them that BUYERS control the market place 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. 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. Anywhere else is fine. Just NOT ESSO AND NOT BP STATIONS. They control the market. In order for the rest to follow suit, we boycott these two only.


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 not only the UK but across EUROPE TOO. It's really simple to do!!

I am sending this note to a lot of 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 receiving this, 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!!! and bingo we win big time. Their sales will be hugely affected thus leaving them no choice but to reduce their prices to win customers back again. Heck if the europeans can be strong enough blockade docks etc. etc. etc. show our true british Spirit by being part of a very very simple scheme that is not hurting you in any way, only ESSO, and BP. Try and avoid Shell too if you can, as theyre the second largest, but primarily the top 2.

Again, all You have to do is send this to 10 people. That's all.(and
not buy at ESSO/BP or shell if possible)........ 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 8days!!!


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 70p a LITRE .

It's easy to make this happen. Just forward this email, and buy your petrol at Asda, Tesco, Sainsburys, Morrisons, Jet, Total, Texaco etc.

AND boycott BP and Esso

Might be better to get Mr brown to stop taxing fuel so much as most of the cost is tax and VAT on the tax !

having previously owned a filling station, i'd think a lot of people would be surprised at how little per litre the companies ( and filling stations )make from petrol, certainly i can't think of many businesses that make such a low percentage profit on their main product. the last time i saw any true comparison figures ( 2005) the uk had the cheapest pre tax and duty petrol in europe !. As jeremy clarckson said a while back, if you take the 70p per litre that the goverment makes off you end up with a cost of 40p or approx £1.80 a gallon. for that 40 p per litre they have to find the stuff, get it out of the ground, transport it to the refinery, distill the various grades of oil product and then transport the petrol to the filling station. all for an operating profit of about 4.5 - 5.0 %. your filling station may well be making just 1.5 pence per litre gross which is little more than 1.5 % profit and they then lose 17.5% in vat before being taxed on their profits.

one of the biggest problems with the fuel trade in this country is the falling level of local competition due to the "big" companies lowering their prices, how many people switched to esso when they had their "price watch" campaign as it was cheaper than their local filling station ? a lot of them are the same people now complaining that esso are "charging so much" for their petrol. in fact during this campaign the esso stations them selves were often forced to operate on profits of 0.1 pence per litre and esso at times supplied the fuel at or even below cost price. you certainly don't see any the "price watch" campaign now but you do struggle when your low on petrol to find a local filling station. local competition wouldn't bring the price down but would improve the level of availability.

one overlooked benefit of our over taxed fuel is that in fact we've suffered a small percentage rise in fuel costs than countries such as the usa where fuel has traditionally been much cheaper. if that sounds strange look at it like this, if fuel was £1.00 per litre including duty of 70p and then rose to £1.10 it is just a 10% rise but if your in a country with no duty then your price will rise from 30p to 40p per litre, a 25% rise! still cheaper than us but countries with cheap fuel costs are traditionally less frugal in its use ( 5ltr v8 "compact" cars anyone? ) and a 25% or similar rise can (and has) have a huge effect on industry and motorists used to fuel costs being a small percentage of overall costs. I know its not much comfort when your filling up but it does make our economy less susceptable.

if you want cheaper fuel you should hope the goverment reduce their duty and tax, in particular even if they dont actually reduce the overall cost, they do have room to hold their "profit" at the level they budgeted for before the current rise in prices as every 10 pence rise will produce an extra 1.175 pence in increased vat payment.

finally going back to the cost of fuel before tax, when your filling up at tesco or any other filling station with a shop, have a look at how much they charge for a bottle of water and be thankfull you dont have to run your car on evian !

p.s. just found an interesting fact. in 1980 the pre duty cost of petrol was 15.1 pence per litre. if it had risen in line with inflation it would have reached 39.5 pence in 2005. in fact it was just under 25 pence and has only now reached that level.

well put,

One tank of petrol = two membership fees :lol:

just read in classic car weekly

numbers of uk filling stations have now fallen to 9,500.


this is the lowest figure since 1912 !

Just like this club.......

Forgive me for asking but where do the Supermarkets buy their fuel for their petrol stations?
Is it not Esso/BP or Shell refineries as these are the 3 main companies in this country that supply fuel. Are we still adding to their pockets even if we do go elsewhere?

Just a thought that maybe the only way we can do anything to cut the price is not attack the oil companies but rather the government, especially as its budget day! What we really need is less of the apathy from the drivers on the road and go and completely blockade London or something similar to what happened in 2000 so the gov actually start listening!!

Just my view