[OT] That chain letter about boycotting Esso

Zog The Undeniable said:

So tell me petrol is too expensive again?

PETROL IS TOO EXPENSIVE.

"Zog The Undeniable" <[email hidden]> wrote in message
news:40b646dd.0@entanet...

Quoted message said:

Anyone else got it? The campaigners are trying to get petrol prices
down to 69p. Apart from the sheer idiocy of believing oil companies can
actually cut prices by this much and stay in business:

People are driving half a mile to the shops instead of walking. They're
buying cars with unnecessarily big engines (all the directors' cars at
work are at least 4 litres, some 5 litres, in an overcrowded country
with a 70mph maximum speed limit). People buy 4x4s that do under 20mpg.
3 million people are expected to be caught on speed cameras this year
- fuel consumption goes up with speed, rather dramatically on motorways.

So tell me petrol is too expensive again?

Indeed, probably 90% of the people who complain about petrol prices could
have effectively halved them had they taken more care choosing their last
car.

Of course, the boycott idea is junk anyway because the people it would hurt
would be the retailers, who in many istances are franchisees or
independents, rather than the oil companies directly. The oil companies will
still sell the same amount of oil overall. And if the boycott did put their
costs up, guess how they would recover them?

--
Tumbleweed

Remove my socks for email address

"Zog The Undeniable" <[email hidden]> wrote in message
news:40b646dd.0@entanet...

Quoted message said:

Anyone else got it? The campaigners are trying to get petrol prices
down to 69p. Apart from the sheer idiocy of believing oil companies can
actually cut prices by this much and stay in business:

At 69p per litre - 17.5% of that is VAT - so price before VAT = 58.7p / l
Fuel duty for ultra-low-sulphur petrol is 47.1p per litre

So the retailer would take just 11.6 pence per litre (the Government taking
57.4p / l). I don't think for a moment that any fuel retailer would be able
to survive getting just 11.6p / litre for their petrol - I'm sure the raw
cost is much higher than that - add on refining and transportation costs -
and they'll be making a huge loss.

I think most petrol retailers will aim for only a 2 or 3 pence per litre
profit in most cases. In a little table below - I've put the cost at the
pump on the left - with amount of money retailer gets in the middle - and
amount government takes from duty and VAT on the right. Notice how the
amount the government gets through fuel duty and VAT doesn't change all that
much with price - but the amount brought in by the retailer rises quite
sharply with increasing price at the pumps. The following works for
Ultra-Low Sulphur petrol and diesel until 1st September of this year. I've
put quite a large range of values on. Who knows what some of the prices will
get to if a new fuel protest does go ahead.

55.3p / l - retailers taking nothing - govt taking 55.3p / l
60p / l - retailers taking 4.0p / l - govt taking 56.0p / l
65p / l - retailers taking 8.2p / l - govt taking 56.8p / l
70p / l - retailers taking 12.5p / l - govt taking 57.5p / l
75p / l - retailers taking 16.7p / l - govt taking 58.3p / l
80p / l - retailers taking 21.0p / l - govt taking 59.0p / l
85p / l - retailers taking 25.2p / l - govt taking 59.8p / l
90p / l - retailers taking 29.5p / l - govt taking 60.5p / l
95p / l - retailers taking 33.8p / l - govt taking 61.2p / l
£1 / l - retailers taking 38.0p / l - govt taking 62.0p / l
£1.05 / l - retailers taking 42.3p / l - govt taking 62.7p / l
£1.099 / l - retailers taking 46.4p / l - govt taking 63.5p / l
(highest UK pump price so far - found in Blackpool, Lancashire)
£1.342 / l - retailers taking 67.1p / l - govt taking 67.1p / l
(price where the government takings match the retailers income)

Zog The Undeniable posted ...

Quoted message said:

Anyone else got it? The campaigners are trying to get petrol prices
down to 69p. Apart from the sheer idiocy of believing oil companies
can actually cut prices by this much and stay in business:

People are driving half a mile to the shops instead of walking.
They're buying cars with unnecessarily big engines (all the
directors' cars at work are at least 4 litres, some 5 litres, in an
overcrowded country with a 70mph maximum speed limit). People buy
4x4s that do under 20mpg. 3 million people are expected to be
caught on speed cameras this year - fuel consumption goes up with
speed, rather dramatically on motorways.

So tell me petrol is too expensive again?

Petrol is too expensive, which is why I don't use it, 'cept in the
motorbikes, generator, strimmer, chain saw, lawn-mower, compressor and
molotov cocktails .. 😉

--
Paul

(8(|) Homer rocks .. 😉

Zog The Undeniable said:

- fuel consumption goes up with speed, rather dramatically on motorways.

Except for the obvious that it takes more fuel to go faster under the
same conditions, I'm not sure that that's true, my car uses less fuel
on a motorway per mile at 80mph than it does in my typical normal
mix of driving. And my normal mix of driving is pretty fuel efficient
in that the car never does less than 3 or 4 miles at once and more
typically 7 or more miles of country driving, with almost no town
or city driving overall, so it's going to be much better than an
urban-driven car.

Quoted message said:

So tell me petrol is too expensive again?

Well, it is and it isn't. I think it's a bit on the expensive side
at the moment. However, most of it goes in taxes, and if the taxes
weren't raised in this manner they'd be raised some other way. Overall
I'd rather have tax raised in ways I can control (like VAT and fuel
duties, and particularly tobacco tax!) than in ways I can't control,
like income tax.

I'd be less than ingenuous, though, if I didn't admit that I don't have
to use my car (or fuel in any other way) to make my living, so it's more
optional for me than for some.

--
Trevor Barton

Quoted message said:

People are driving half a mile to the shops instead of walking. They're
buying cars with unnecessarily big engines (all the directors' cars at
work are at least 4 litres, some 5 litres, in an overcrowded country
with a 70mph maximum speed limit). People buy 4x4s that do under 20mpg.
3 million people are expected to be caught on speed cameras this year
- fuel consumption goes up with speed, rather dramatically on motorways.

Also with company cars, the marginal cost of a journey is zero- in fact it's
less than zero, because by filling up your nice big tank you get air miles,
loyalty-points or whatever.

My company doesn't offer a cash-in-lieu option, so although it is perfectly
feasible for me to cycle to the station, get on the train and cycle at the
other end, it costs me every time I do because I have to pay for both the
rail ticket and the fuel (in tax).

So, the sooner the government bans flat-rate fuel-benefit the better. I
have pointed out to my company that by giving me a company car and fuel card
they are paying for an open-ended commitment. I could drive to France every
weekend, say 1,000 miles per week, 50,000 miles per year, at 30p per mile
(roughly AA figures), that's £15k. I've suggested that they limit this by
giving me a simple salary increase of approximately one-third of this, and
I'll make my own way (rail fare is £5.80 per day, total per annum roughly
£1,300). I win, they win, the environment wins, they save on time wasted
because there are too many cars in the car park at work and people miss
meetings because some clown has blocked them in.

Naturally this suggestion is too radical, and has been rejected.

So, fuel is clearly NOT too expensive.

Peter

"Zog The Undeniable" <[email hidden]> wrote in message
news:40b646dd.0@entanet...

Quoted message said:

Anyone else got it? The campaigners are trying to get petrol prices
down to 69p. Apart from the sheer idiocy of believing oil companies can
actually cut prices by this much and stay in business:

Petrol retailing is a cut throat business and oil companies (I work for
one) make very little money in terms of pence per litre profit, the vast
majority is of course tax and then you pay VAT on the tax itself! You can
make more money selling sandwiches and coffee in the shop than selling fuel.

Unless people haven't noticed, the price of crude oil has *doubled* over the
past 18 months or so and it is impossible to get the price of petrol to 69p
unless the oil companies actually subsidise the price by diverting profits
from their crude oil business to the retailing division, which is illegal -
unless you're a supermarket apparently.

Of course the chancellor could cut tax until it's 69p.
--
Simon Mason
Anlaby
East Yorkshire.
53°44'N 0°26'W
http://www.simonmason.karoo.net

Zog The Undeniable said:

So tell me petrol is too expensive again?

Absolutely. We should encourage this view and get people to boycott all the
petrol stations until the price is halved. This would mean them not using
their cars and going instead by public transport/bicycle/foot but that is a
sacrifice I am prepared to make ;-^)

Tony

"Tony Raven" <[email hidden]> wrote in message
news:[email hidden]...

Quoted message said:

Zog The Undeniable said:

So tell me petrol is too expensive again?

Absolutely. We should encourage this view and get people to boycott all

the

Quoted message said:

petrol stations until the price is halved. This would mean them not using
their cars and going instead by public transport/bicycle/foot but that is

a

Quoted message said:

sacrifice I am prepared to make ;-^)

Tony

It wouldn't be if you used public transport, put more than a few extra % on
t and it would be completely unusable. The trains I sometimes get out of
Waterloo or into Paddington are often *completely* full. If several
thousand, maybe tens of thousands of additional people tried to use them,
you couldnt even get in the station or onto the platform, let alone the
trains.
--
Tumbleweed

Remove my socks for email address

In news:[email hidden],
Tumbleweed <[email hidden]> typed:

Quoted message said:

It wouldn't be if you used public transport, put more than a few
extra % on t and it would be completely unusable. The trains I
sometimes get out of Waterloo or into Paddington are often
*completely* full. If several thousand, maybe tens of thousands of
additional people tried to use them, you couldnt even get in the
station or onto the platform, let alone the trains.

The trains coming out of Bimingham at rush hour are busy but no one's
standing and the trains are the normal size and the schedules aren't altered
to take more people at that time. In my experience (limited) more or less
the same obtains for other large cities in the UK with one exception. I'd
suggest that there's probably a need to be ensuring that job growth follows
spare capacity in infrastructure in this country.

A

Ambrose Nankivell said:

In news:[email hidden],
Tumbleweed <[email hidden]> typed:

Quoted message said:

It wouldn't be if you used public transport, put more than a few
extra % on t and it would be completely unusable. The trains I
sometimes get out of Waterloo or into Paddington are often
*completely* full. If several thousand, maybe tens of thousands of
additional people tried to use them, you couldnt even get in the
station or onto the platform, let alone the trains.

The trains coming out of Bimingham at rush hour are busy but no one's
standing and the trains are the normal size and the schedules aren't altered
to take more people at that time.

And although trains in and out of London are rammed, they carry a high
percentage of the commuters. Very few people drive to/from central
London daily, so if they all took the train it wouldn't make much
difference (to the trains). Just a few %! It SHOULD be possible to
cope with this with an extra coach or two per train.

London car traffic is mostly journeys within the city, especially
suburb to suburb. Outside the centre there is spare rail capacity, but
not much of it is orbital.

I'll believe fuel prices are high enough when they have a significant
impact on people's car-buying, relocation, and mode of transport
decisions.

Colin McKenzie

--
Why believe statistics?
Ignore them and you can believe the damned lies instead!

Colin McKenzie said:

And although trains in and out of London are rammed, they carry a high
percentage of the commuters.

They're not rammed or crammed. The Japanese would get 50% more passengers
onto them for commuting. A train ain't crammed till you've been pushed on by
station staff and the pressure of other bodies round you means you can lift
both feet of the ground without sliding down (and the average Japanese commute
is two hours each way like that!)

Tony

In news:[email hidden],
Tony Raven <[email hidden]> typed:

Quoted message said:

Colin McKenzie said:

And although trains in and out of London are rammed, they carry a
high percentage of the commuters.

They're not rammed or crammed. The Japanese would get 50% more
passengers onto them for commuting. A train ain't crammed till
you've been pushed on by station staff and the pressure of other
bodies round you means you can lift both feet of the ground without
sliding down (and the average Japanese commute is two hours each way
like that!)

UKian social norms may beg to differ on that front.

But of course Colin's point about commuter trains already taking most of the
traffic along their routes was pertinent. I wonder how much of the UK's
commutes are easily served by public transport. Numbers, anyone?

Ambrose