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Its funny lback last year when the price of fuel was approaching £1 ltr all our truck drivers were up in arms and caused blockaids etc, yet it continues to rise and nobody is doing anything about it we just sit back and take it on the chin as usual. The press dont even seem to be reporting on it.
Are the haulage companies getting a back hander to keep quiet.?My small van now costs me £60 from empty to full where as it used to cost me £35.00, Yet we have not increased our charges to customers.
What can we all do?
When i recieved this email i thought i would pass it on.
We are hitting £127.9 a litre in some areas now Whitby 18/05/08 soon we will be faced with paying £1.50 a ltr. Philip Hollsworth offered this good idea:
This makes MUCH MORE SENSE than the ‘don’t buy petrol on a certain day campaign that was going around last April or May! The oil companies just laughed at that because they knew we wouldn’t
continue to hurt ourselves by refusing to buy petrol. It was more of an inconvenience to us than it was a problem for them. BUT,whoever thought of this idea, has come up with a plan that can really work.Please read it and join in!
Now that the oil companies and the OPEC nations have conditioned us to think that the cost of a litre is CHEAP, we need to take aggressive action to teach them that BUYERS control the market place
not sellers. With the price of petrol going up more each day, we consumers need to take action. The only way we are going to see the price of petrol come down is if we hit someone in the pocket by not purchasing their Petrol!And we can do that WITHOUT hurting ourselves. Here’s the idea:
For the rest of this year DON’T purchase ANY petrol from the two biggest oil companies (which now are one), ESSO and BP.
If they are not selling any petrol, they will be inclined to reduce their prices. If they reduce their prices, the other companies will have to follow suit. But to have an impact we need to reach literally millions of Esso and BP petrol buyers.
It’s really simple to do!!
Now, don’t wimp out at this point… keep reading and I’ll explain how simple it is to reach millions of people!!
I am sending this note to a lot of people. If each of you send it to at least ten more (30 x 10 = 300)… and those 300 send it to at least ten more (300 x 10 = 3,000) … and so on, by the time the message reaches the sixth generation of people, we will have reached over THREE MILLION consumers! If those three million get excited and pass this on to ten friends each, then 30 million people will have been contacted!
If it goes one level further, you guessed it… ..
THREE HUNDRED MILLION PEOPLE!!!
Again, all You have to do is send this to 10 people. That’s all.(and not buy at ESSO/BP) How long would all that take?
If each of us sends this email out to ten more people within one day of receipt,
all 300 MILLION people could conceivably be contacted within the next 8days!!! Acting together we can make a difference.If this makes sense to you, please pass this message on.
PLEASE HOLD OUT UNTIL THEY LOWER THEIR PRICES TO THE 69p a LITRE RANGE
It’s easy to make this happen. Just forward this email, and buy your petrol at Shell, Asda,Tesco, Sainsburys, Morrisons Jet etc. i.e. boycott BP and Esso
Re: Fuel Prices
Where do you think Tesco, Asda, Morrisons etc. buy thier petrol from? Esso/BP/Shell. That’s who. So the impact will be a sideways shift, rather than any real detriment to thier overall sales.
Also, 69p a litre? Just not going to happen, never! Yes fuel is lots higher than it should be, but it’s not ever going to reach those lows again.
Finally, sending ten mails out in a chain mail type spam.. once again, bad idea that most people will have filters to (rightly imo) reject it as spam.
Don’t get me wrong, I agree with you that prices are too high and the market is being milked, but I just don’t agree with your methods or your assumptions.
Re: Fuel Prices
Guys
Dont shoot the messenger
i just recieved this via email and thought it may be of interest 😳
I only put it on the forum for any one to read you dont have to send it.
I know it is not the petrol companies making the money, its the goverment fault taxes in this country are so high, yet we do nothing about it just sit and take it. Nobody is prepared to make a stand.
What do you do, I had a letter from John today about the cost of fuel and he is trying to absorb the extra cost in the ISE machines but you can only do it for so long then you have to start to increase your cost and pass them onto the customer. 😕
Agreed, it won’t work and it has been tried many times, as well as boycotting particular suppliers etc.
Simple way to combat the cost for those doing contract work is to do what ALL the haulage firms are doing, simply invoice a fuel surcharge. Currently this seems to be running at between 7 and 9{e5d1b7155a01ef1f3b9c9968eaba33524ee81600d00d4be2b4d93ac2e58cec2d} of the total bill.
One thing is for sure, I cannot sustain this sort of increase in costs without passing it on.
K.
Re: Fuel Prices
If you are on diesel why not have a go at recycling food oil and make your own,I am sure most chippys will be only too happy to give it away.From what I can gather it costs pennies to make and dependent on use I dont think you need to pay duty on it.
You do need to pay duty on it
As soon as it goes into your tank its fuel.
There was a bloke on my local bbc news who did just that and the tax man got him.
Re: Fuel Prices
The rules have been relaxed on personal use of veg oil as road transport fuel. Cant remember amount but seem to rememer thinking it would take my wee van around 25000 miles.
The price of fuel is getting beyond a joke though, the government will never u turn on the tax take on fuel, a fall in the dollar price of crude is the only thing that will reverse this worrying trend.
Re: Fuel Prices
Intresting to see that the Fuel Price subject is back on the agenda, I raised this very subject way back last November when I decided to increase charges to go some way to addressing the balance.
The sad fact is that all of us as consumers are footing the bill of fuel, we all need fuel one way or another and we are all paying the high costs. Of course there is NO shortage of fuel OPEC are not producing enough to which is creating high oil prices. Add the increasing taxes and this is why we are all suffering.
Come October further Tax will be added and more than likely oil will be costing us more. perhaps £ 6.00 a gallon ?
Food prices have gone up as all of our food is transported hundreds of miles to the supermarkets. We the consumers have got to pay the costs and the Goverment still will not knock any money of the tax they levy.
Some how the public need to mobilse into a organized group and force the politcians to reduce the cost of fuel to a level where the fuel companies make a respectable profit and the Goverment can manage the public purse. I believe that it could be done but all the while we allow this to continue we will in the end be forced to either pay or pass these costs on to the end users of our services just like the hauliers and big companies are doing. The major airlines are going to be adding fuel charges to holidays already booked and paid for as the companies will not ride the excessive costs they are facing.
Re: Fuel Prices
Just put my average labour rates up to £55 from £48, decided I have been to cheap for to long and the fuel increases were the final straw.
GrahamI put up the chargeable rates from yesterday to compensate.
Minimum charge is now £60 plus VAT. More on the odd/harder makes, like £80 on Teka or Kuppersbusch and higher on some.
No impact whatsoever on call volumes.
K.
Re: Fuel Prices
eco garage in holland park london diesel £146.9 unleaded £135.9 a litre couldn’t belive my eyes!!! 😡
kwatt wrote:I put up the chargeable rates from yesterday to compensate.
Minimum charge is now £60 plus VAT. More on the odd/harder makes, like £80 on Teka or Kuppersbusch and higher on some.
No impact whatsoever on call volumes.
K.
Very Interesting. I thought I was expensive at £50+VAT. Time for an increase methinks.
Re: Fuel Prices
What is interesting from my point of view reading all that’s been said in this thread is the natural ‘knee-jerk’ business reaction to the ever spiralling fuel prices. 😉
Fuel goes up so everyone reacts with understandable alarm and immediately raises their service charges to offset the extra expense accordingly. Likewise all other businesses and services allied to the trade reacts in exactly the same way and raises the cost of their services in a similar fashion.
Passing the cost on all well and good but at some point the bubble has to burst and I suspect, likely as not, pretty darn soon….? 😕
Meanwhile all this is going on the poor customer is faced with an even starker prospect in realising that getting their errant appliance fixed is financially impractical due to the call-out charges.
The first to suffer the effects of this is the very small traders and one man bands. They dare not raise their prices for fear of a drastic drop in turnover and have to be more resourceful in offsetting the extra cost through more rational means. (i.e better call planning, reducing excessive advertising overheads and improving stock purchasing control etc)
Larger firms will suffer most but over a longer sustainable period and the effect of the increase costs will be far more dramatic. They have to be more rational in the way they offset the fuel increase in a similar way to the small outfits. Slapping big increases in chargeable call-out fees will in the long term do them no favours at all. Demanding more money for their services will in the end be their downfall. For them the bubble may appear to be intact and floating on high right now in spite of the increase. But it’s directly above them all the while and could burst at any moment?
Pretty ‘Grim Reaper’ type analogy I must admit but nevertheless in this fickle trade one has to be watchful of just how far you can push it? Slapping an overnight 15{e5d1b7155a01ef1f3b9c9968eaba33524ee81600d00d4be2b4d93ac2e58cec2d} increase in call-out charges (as some have admitted to doing in this thread :rolls: ) is hardly going to do anyone any favours, least of all – themselves! 🙁
Spiralling fuel prices are here to stay let no-one doubt that for a moment. The duty the government puts on fuel is (and always has been) set in stone, it will not change even when the Tories take the helm next term. The world has got enough fuel to last for several hundred years. The OPEC countries have fuel stockpiles of unimaginable excess to ride any of the worlds demands twice or three times over. There is no fuel problem other than it’s cost. BLACK GOLD is what they call it and so long as you can pay the price of gold, you can have as much as you like for as long as you like.
Take the ‘better gas mileage’ approach to the vehicle you drive. Pay more attention toward avoiding wasteful unnecessary mileage journeys to customers that have gone out. Before doing a 5 mile trip spend 10 pence on a phone call to make sure someones at home? Organise daily ’round trips’ for your engineers to avoid zig-zagging all over the counties. Be less specific on time calls and insist your customer do likewise. All these tips and more can ensure that you maintain your current business footing in spite of the increased costs.
Slapping big increases in call out charges will likely only mask your already poor business planning if none of these ideals are practised by you and your company in the first place…………..tightening the belt of your already oversized gut might be the making of many of us after all!!!! 😀
Re: Fuel Prices
Some interesting points martin. As a sole trader i have thus far resisted the temptation to raise my callout to cover the 30 odd {e5d1b7155a01ef1f3b9c9968eaba33524ee81600d00d4be2b4d93ac2e58cec2d} rise in Diesel recently.
Its not that i wouldnt like to, rather, as you pointed out, i feel it might rock a somewhat wobbly boat. There is some aggressive price cutting going on in the sheds & supermarkets at the mo, and i feel we all have to deal with this by offering a vaiable cost repair.
If im honest, my weekly diesel bill has risen around £10 over the last year, so its not a huge issue, and as you say, its suprising how you can trim 30 or 40 miles off your weekly amount by better planning. I have reduced my week miles from well over 300 to around 270 simply through better planning.
So yes, we’re all gonna have to start seeing oil as the finite, precious stuff it is & adapt accordingly, we dont like change, but change we must 😯
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