Guys n Gals
This newspaper report may or may not interest you.

In this mornings Swiss Sunday newspaper - TA Sonntags Zeitung- there is a survey of where to buy the cheapest fuel and the price of fuel over the last 10 yrs: 2002 2012.

The cheapest place was found at independent (non oil company) garages followed by the food retailing chain's garages, then the "branded" oil company garages and finally the most expensive place - fuel stations on the motorway. It occurred to me that there is a consistent retailer/price supply pattern across the EU. But Why?

Surely every country is a unique consumer market place with widely different tax and duty regimes, so where's the justification for this identical retailed price matrix. There isn't any - it serves to demonstrate the mutual cosy self preservation of the role between the energy producers and a State's revenue needs.

The article reported that in the last 12mths (April'11 tp April'12) in Switzerland the market's distributed price (refinery to retailer) moved 38 times (coincidentally 19 each way up or down) yet the supply price (retailer to consumer) moves by small decimal points set daily every morning. So the retailed price is far more volatile than the market price, and is instantly passed on to the consumer.

For comparison, and using this morning Xmarket FX CHF/GBP here is the 1 litre retail fuel cost re 95 Octane petrol averaged 2002: CHF1.30 = GBP£0.88p 2012: CHF1.78 = GBP£1.21p. For those diesel FL2's this mornings price here is CHF1.91 per litre = GBP£1.30p

Finally a Press Spokesperson for Esso was reported as saying that all the fuel distributed was more or less identical from every producer, explaining that the price differential was down to "customer service" in that they (Esso) also provided on-site fresh food and other household commodities at their retail sites. From that I can conclude that a) supermarket fuel is the same as buying direct from an oil company owned petrol station, and the extra price fot oil company "super advanced" fuels is not for anything extra added to them but for a contribution to the fresh pint of milk and carton of eggs you've just purchased at the till.