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Why are fuel perks at grocery stores so ubiquitous?
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2024
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People are weird about gasoline. They'll drive around looking for the cheapest option, to save 2 cents/gallon. Even with a huge tank, that's less than 50 cents of total savings.
So a grocery store can offer, say, 10¢ savings, and it only actually costs them like $1.50-$2.00 per customer. That's way less than other sales that are harder to advertise and don't bring in the same amount of business.
Ultimately the psychological benefit for the shopper is more than the financial cost to the store. The others societal costs don't come in to that equation.
Bless 'em for keeping the price pressure on, but this is so very true. Once I ran a couple of mental hypotheticals, I stopped giving a shit, beyond avoiding places right by airports that jack it up a dollar or more (Las Vegas and especially Orlando, with lots of tourists in rentals, are the worst offenders I've seen).
For a pretty extreme example consider, as you say, a large 25-gal tank, and filling up from dry twice a week, at an average of $0.10/gal non-optimal price: you pay an annual premium of $260 bucks not to drive yourself batty hunting for pennies, and burning at least a tiny bit more fuel to do it. Most people will pay far less. It's just this weird thing that stuck in people's brains long past the point where a cent increase was any significant percentage of the fuel purchase.
Since 2001 here in WA we have a system where petrol stations have to lock in their price for a day by announcing it the afternoon before. The highlights used to be mentioned on the local news and newspaper (maybe they still are, who knows?). But more importantly they all get published on https://www.fuelwatch.wa.gov.au/ so its pretty trivial to visit the site in the afternoon and check the stores along the commute home, plus you can also compare their tomorrow price to see if you should wait until then.
Looking at that site right now I can see 25% variance across my commute without even considering a detour. Its a pretty handy system.
Fair; I guess I should have run some data. I just used gasbuddy.com to run a similar track for what would have been my rather lengthy commute if my employer had asked us to return to office (and kept the lease on that building). Apart from a couple of outliers just outside the Dallas-Fort Worth airport, I'm only getting an 8% variance (about USD 0.23/gallon, versus your 25% and AUD 0.55/litre -- is that right?).
That said, Iwill admit that $0.10/gallon suboptimal average price is probably more likely than I thought, though with a less intense driving situation one would still be well under the $260/year "convenience premium." Outside the US and other oil-subsidizing countries, the numbers clearly work out very differently.
The numbers on fuelwatch have rolled over for the new day now but when I was looking last night there was around 5-10% variation within each day but also a 15-20% price drop from Tuesday to Wednesday. By min-maxing across both days I could a min that was 25% lower than the max.
The range would be much less impressive if we only had access to a single days prices.