Every Tuesday I fill both our vehicles.. and since E10 (the new ethanol added fuel blend) came into the market I have used it, from the same brand and usually same petrol station.
Yesterday I went to fill the cars and found that my usual service (odd that you don’t get anything like service these) station was ‘out’ of E10 .. k .. I’ll head up the road .. nope . out .. ok I’ll drive over to … and surprise they are also out. Doing a quick survey I discovered that all brand X’s service stations in my area were out of E10 but were selling normal unleaded at a couple of cents more than their competitors.
A few months ago the service station industry was accused of shutting down certain types of fuel (sorry sir we’re ‘out’) forcing patrons to buy the more expensive alternative .. this was always done on a Tuesday (Tuesday in our area is the cheap day in our fuel cycle ?!) meaning that if people had budgeted to fill on this day they really didn’t have much choice apart from a bit of driving around in search of someone who wasn’t out of fuel.
Now it seems that another brand have started this again with a slightly different twist – which most of the public will just blithely accept and move on a few dollars lighter.
