It is true the big 3 are so much more then just petrol prices and like all multinationals have their fingers in lots of pies, but ..
It is right that the public should be annoyed when the price of crude goes down but the petrol stations do not lower their prices ???
ex
1 . cost price goes up, so prices go up, ok fine.
2 . Cost prices go down, but prices remain the same or still go up.
3 . Cost prices go back up again after going down, but prices go up again.
etc etc etc
This has been the pattern, and it is pure greed, nothing more. The worst of it is, that all of us are paying for this, because all transport companies transport goods by road to all the shops, and this cost gets past on to the customer.
Forgive me for saying, but the price at the pump is not dictated to by the oil companies, but by the wholesale price and what each retailer (who are franchisees or supermarkets) charges.
Given the majority (by usage) of filling stations are now run by the big supermarkets, then perhaps they need to share some of the blame for not passing on wholesale market price cuts as fast as price rises.
The franchises running the BP, Shell and Esso branded filling stations often just match the price differentials between them and the supermarkets nearby in order to keep trade steady.
Unlike the supermarkets, who often have used fuel as a loss-leader to get customers in the door at the main shop, the franchised outlets obviously have to turn a profit, often located in either expensive areas (rent/rates) with high volume or in outlying ones with low volume of trade. I doubt if many such people running them make fortunes, given how many have gone out of business since the supermakets muscled in on the trade 30 years or so ago.
In the recent case of Shell and BP, they've made a lot of bank this past year due to higher oil prices (which rose far more than general inflation, because fuel is normally the primary cause these days of it, and general inflation lags well behind), but in 2020, they suffered big losses because demand collapsed and so did oil and wholesale prices because of the lockdowns.
I suspect over the two years, their overall profitability has been about the same (averaged out) as previous years.
What we should far more concerned about is how much taxpayer and borrowed (from future generations) money has been spent and wasted by governments worldwide to 'fight' the pandemic and often to pay people to sit at home doing nothing or be less productive than in their normal workplace, which has to be paid back - with interest.
Once restrictions are lifted, everyone goes back to their 'normal' workplace and conditions, factoiries reopen and get back up to full strength and the shorter-term inflationary pressures ease as supply chains get better, but the long-term inflationary base will be (in my view) quite a bit higher than the one we've been used to, mainly because so much government spending has been previously kept off books via creative accounting, but with the hugely increased money supply over the pandemic and profigant spending on measures during it, the piper will be coming very soon.
In addition, costs in developing nations and the big manufacturers like China will be going up cosniderably in the next decade as people in this nations get better off and demand higher wages.
I'd put money on the base (not actual) inflation being nearer to 4% rather than the 1-2% it was for the last 10+ years. I suspect it'll feel far more like the 1970s again over the next decade, which does not bode well.
|
