Hey. I thought I'd open this thread to discuss Aussie petrol stations ripping us off.
I don't know what it's like in other cities, but in Sydney we have obvious collusion between petrol stations. They follow an arbitrary "price cycle" whereby one day, a servo will decide to raise the price by 20c/L. All the other petrol stations soon follow. Over the next 2 or so weeks, they will slowly drop the price, until another servo decides to raise the price again. Price collusion is anti-competitive and illegal but unfortunately difficult to prove.
The only thing consumers can do to avoid this is to try and fill up from the cheaper servos. But even on the day the prices are raised, you'll see plenty of cars filling their cars up, encouraging the servos to keep ripping us off. These motorists are obviously not ozBargainers.
How do ozBargainers avoid paying too much for fuel?
Right now I quite like the app Petrol Spy which is a crowdsourced petrol app, where people report prices of servos around them. It's a great idea but unfortunately just not active enough. I try to regularly contribute and perhaps some of you should check it out too. I can see it being quite powerful to fighting the colluding servos.
I also like Motormouth's fuel search but unfortunately a lot of the smaller (and usually cheaper) independents aren't on it. Also, prices are only updated 5am every morning, meaning when some servos have started to raise their prices, you don't know if they've raised their price or not yet.
OzBargain shows us the power of a large number of tightarses, I wonder if we have any power to discourage the price-gouging behaviour.
This post isn't a whinge or complaint, it's a discussion on how we, as proud ozBargainers, can get the best deal possible.
You've just noticed this?
It's been going on for well over a decade, if not two.