Petrol price fixing

[Frank Musco]

I haven't seen much of a fluctuating price the last three weeks, PULP has been around $1.70 around my area (western suburbs) so for the first time ever my tiny Sprint took $80. All I can say about the high price is lucky I get 8 litres/100k.

I went shopping at Coles today and noticed that if I bought 2 slabs of coke I get 20 cents off a litre of petrol. WTF? They also have the consistent 'saving'? of 4 cents/litre when you spend more than $30 in their store.

So I'd like to ask the question: What does going shopping for food have to do with the price of petrol?

Soon I'm going to fit a tiny engine to run a generator and fit a high torque ELECTRIC motor to my gearbox!, And I'm going to get hydrogen from water through Electrolysis and store it in some old oxy bottles to run the tiny motor! Then the oil companies, government and who ever else that has their finger in the pie can have their petrol. 

[1750GT]

Or you could simply do what the bazilians and most south american countries are doing to get around in their cars. They turn their old used deep frying oil into deisel (home brew) and run their cars on home brew deisel instead.

There is some very interetsing American muscle in brazil and throughout South America being run on transplanted deisel engines using home brew deisel.

It makes a visit to the fish and chip shop more interesting - to ask for the old oil rather than the Friday family pack.

1750GT

[colcol]

Hey 1750GT, i wonder if the used deep frying oil 'spikes' like it does here in Victoria, on Friday morning it goes up 12 cents per litre, because everyone has fish and chips on a Friday night, and then drifts down 1 cent per litre per day until it 'spikes' again, but that would be price fixing, thats illegal, the A.C.C.C. headed by Mr. D. Sim, would be looking to bust some small fish and chip shop vendors for some publicity on the news so it looks like they are doing their job, Colin.

[colcol]

Petrol pricing has gone mad in Victoria, this month it was $1.28, $1.35, $1.37 and on Tuesday $1.51, Petrol cycle or as the RACV calls it a spike is now 7 days, 10 days or 14 days?, who would know, in the AGE on Thursday, Tandburg has a cartoon of the ACCC, sitting outside a petrol station in a car with ACCC on the car, with the ACCC official asleep in the car with 'Z-Z-Z-Z's coming out of the car to indicate the ACCC asleep at the wheel....while the slightly devious looking Petrol Station attendant putting up a $1.58 price, replacing the $1.40 sign, all while the ACCC official is fast asleep, would post cartoon, [if i knew how], but may breach copywright law, then i would have the ACCC after me, Colin.

[TFJ100]

One of the things that has annoyed me is how the price of 98 octane used to be 6c a litre more than 91 octane. Then at some stage, the oil companies realised that the popular press focused only on the 91 octane price in their reporting, and that increasingly a larger percentage of buyers were using 95 and 98 octane. So my guess is that they worry about what the 91 octane price is, but they will continue to slide the price of 95 and 98 octane price up - it is now about 14c a litre more. And of course they all go up in unison.

I'm not sure that there has been any production cost increase, so it is likely to banking pure profit.

The problem for the ACCC is they have to prove collusion for price fixing. I think there is another issue called price signalling, where it is too easy to create a new price which everyone else follows, but that is inevitable. Frustrating for consumers.


Torben

[colcol]

Can you imagine if the same thing happened to milk, bread or beer, everyweek it went up 15 cents at every supermarket, within an hour of each other?, then the ACCC would have to wake up and do something, but of course, we are motorist cash cows, so we are open to this sort of palava, its only started to happen in the last 10 years or so, here in Victoria, Colin.

[colcol]

Well it seems the ACCC have finally woken up that the big petrol chains have been working together to co-ordinate petrol price movements by posting petrol price hikes to the Oil Price Watch,  [ OPW], a service ran by a Queensland company that was able to propose price increases in the Melbourne market, by using a members only website.
OPW provide Petrol Station chains, who are the only ones allowed to subscribe, with proposed petrol prices, then the chains respond to price increases within half an hour.
"This we believe, is very concerning behaviour", ACCC chairman Rod Simms said, "We allege, that they can propose prices, respond to prices, we allege they can send a price increase, see how the others respond, and therefore interact that way, Colin.

[bendover]

Peopl interstate, from the ACT ,are lucky. Our petrol price hasnt changed for almost 2 years. 91 is always 155.9 and the stuff we use is almost 1.80 and that is wrong.

So you guys are lucky that you have these so called cycles, the wheel fell our bike years ago.

[jazig.k]

I haven't read through this thread... But I'll drop my input here.

I used to be close friends with a girl whose parents ran ***** just a few hundred meters from my house.
On a fancy computer behind the counter is an internet connection. Every hour on the second, that computer updates a single little box. Can anyone guess what it updates?
They received notification from head office regarding the prices they charge. They have 5 minute deadline to change the prices on the board out the front if it went up or down.
Surprisingly, they don't choose the prices of petrol, it was the head office who told them. It was a franchise though so that doesn't at all seem odd to me.

[colcol]

And how hard would it be for the arseclowns at the ACCC to find this out, you just send someone to wait in a car and when the price goes up, walk in and ask them why.
It is friggin price fixing which is illegal, run any sort of business and try this lurk and you will be in trouble, just like the cardboard kings were a few years ago and got fined a few million dollars for their trouble.
Got worse since the supermarkets got involved, wonder what petrol company ALDI will jump into bed with?, Colin.

[Davidm1600]

Down here in Tassie, we don't have this upwards and downwards movement of petrol depending on which day of the week it is. Its just not cheap.  Probably in part due to the extra distance it takes getting across the fishpond from the big island to the small one.

But I agree with the views re 95 and 98 being so much more expensive than 91, which is what the media seem to concentrate on. 

[Barry Edmunds]

Hard to disagree with any of the comments posted here. It is an indisputable facts that Australia does not have one politician smart enough or possess the political will to have a serious go at the oil industry. Besides, no federal treasurer will ever contemplate doing anything whatsoever about killing off the proverbial goose that continues to lay the golden eggs and every price increase of fuel adds more GST revenue to the federal government's coffers to waste on some other useless policy. It should also be remembered that 'price cycle' is simply the oil industry's own terminology for price manipulation. The price of petrol will continue to rise and fall and rise again and again plainly and simply because the oil industry can. No point in calling for yet another inquiry into the fuel industry, every such inquiry to date has failed completely because the oil industry employs smarter lawyers than the government does and they pay their lawyers far more than governments do.
An old legal adage: Justice is what you get when you have run out of money.

[Ash Gordon]

Over here in Adelaide Costco is about to open and they have built a Costco Gasoline outlet right alongside a Shell on Churchill Rd.

They will quite possibly price cheaper or will they just follow the big players prices - it will be interesting to see how they operate.

[colcol]

Yesterday in Melbourne, the petrol price went up from $1.35 to $1.65, because it had been down a few days and the weekend was coming up.
Then noticed on Television that the price of oil had just fallen to $80 per barrel???.
I am so pigheaded, [ oh really? ], that i won't fill up when the price goes up, because then its victory to the price manipulators.
Once i was driving along the Eastern Freeway and i ran out of petrol.
Always carry, [ illegally ] petrol in the boot, so i was fueling up the car at the side of the freeway, and a truck drove past a seem to spray 'liquid' on me, looked up and the truck had a load of portaloo's on it with 'dunny's are us' on the side, i think that was karma for past sins, Colin.

[Evan Bottcher]

Ew.