Fear and panic? Gouge gouge gouge!

[andygates]

One Kirkcaldy petrol station - Rix Garage - made the news last night for raising fuel prices to an arse-clenching £1.45 a litre.  This on the back of the nervousness about the upcoming Grangemouth refinery strike -- but really, as there are ample stocks and this is pure naked gouging.  I do hope someone has put a brick through their windows. 

Will this focus attention on fuel prices?  For sure - nobody's paying attention to the actual strike, everyone's watching the pumps.  I'd like to think that the shock might nudge people towards leaner vehicles and alt.fuels, but who am I kidding?  The polar melt will make all that delicious Arctic oil available soon.

Comments

[ravenbait.livejournal.com]

Meanwhile I'm thinking I'll take the Claude home tonight and leave him there, because I only use it if I have to, at work, and we don't get paid enough mileage to cover our costs with fuel up to £1.20/litre.

I filled him up on Monday and I haven't used him since.

[andygates.livejournal.com]

Ah but this is madness levels of "above the reasonable price" - not just pricey but the kind of pricey that better come with a token for the car wash and free fellatio from the politician of your choice.

Gouging makes me angry. It's my sense of fair play being assaulted.

Somewhere I once read a libertarian defence of price gouging as a noble and good thing. It was one of the articles that soured me on the whole idea.

[despaer.livejournal.com]

Don't worry, karma will out. There was a garage in Rochdale, I think, that engaged in a similar practise during the fuel strike of whenever-it-was and justified it with the usual rot about ensuring that a valuable resource is shared around correctly (namely money, and all given to him, thinks I).

It was in a paper a few months after all had gone quiet again that he had gone out of business since, once supplies were generally restored, people remembered what he had done and shunned his garage.

Once again, proof that if you want to encourage any particular behaviour or action there is nothing even close to an economic lever. You can bet if people had been told his station was a front for a money laundering operation for the local drug dealers (but still cheap) that no such action would have happened.

[maythen-apple.livejournal.com]

I don't know about over there, but our prices have gone over four dollars a gallon, and hover around that mark all the time now. The gouge is on, but Everyone is in on it.

Unfortunatly, it doesn't seem to make the consumers change their behavior other than to get less civil. Daily I see hordes of SUV's, minivans, and humvees (there's at least six in the smallish town I live in). They almost never have more than a single passenger.

But we're fairly rural, and the bus system is pathetic. Unless you're up for a 30 mile round trip on a bike (which most of us aren't) you have to use the car for most tasks.

It doesn't matter how expensive it gets, people will keep paying because most of them aren't even capable of conceving the possibility of giving up their beloved gas guzzling king cab truck.

[andygates.livejournal.com]

Eventually it will. Let us assume that fuel is currently considered an essential. We know otherwise, we car-sharers and cyclists and public-transporters. So eventually after all of their optional funds are starved out - the Warcraft submissions and the mobile phone contracts and all the rest - they'll find that the only way to balance the books is to rethink that position.

Despaer is absolutely right, the only lever worth a damn is an economic one. Until they cannot afford to drive, they will drive because they are habituated to it and they like it.