98 fuel,14cents per litre lol

[FGX335]

Originally Posted by STINKY NINJA

I would have been on it like a fat kid on a cupcake if I had the chance.
Back on the fuel price,if servos only make 1.5 cents per litre why is it that some servos can be 20 cents cheaper than others some days,had it the other day at my local servo,$1.30 odd for 98 while the others were all $1.50ish,surely they wont take a 20 cent loss per litre to make a few bucks on cans of cool drink?
How is that explainable?

They can and will. When the price goes up, the margins can be pretty good, but of course you only get minimal traffic. Then one particular brand or an independent wants to get an advantage, and drops 1c. As the Manager, we had to drive around to all of our competitors, check the pricing on their boards, and report back to the boss. He would then advise if we would match, or to hold where we were. We never dropped first, and were always reactive to pricing.

So when you are at your cheapest, you are certainly losing coin, but it balances out over the week to give you an average profit of 1.5c/L. I worked at a site where we could make 3.3c/L, but only because it was the only servo within a 10 minute drive and we would sell over 1m litres of fuel a week. Then the other guys moved in one by one, and the site was a shadow of its former self.

Being reactive to the market, the other guys would put their price up, and if you were the only one on, the sheer number of customers meant that you couldn't change the price (manual price boards). You can't up the price on the bowser because it is illegal, and you can't run out and change the board because you are getting snapped by customers. You would wait for a small break in the queue, run like a man possessed, change the price board, tend to the remaining customers, then activate the price change on your console. Fun times!

We actually sold LPG at a loss, we were told it was for the tax credits.