Morris Minor Owners Club

i receved this .......
feel free to pass it on /

PETROL PRICES - PLEASE READ AND JOIN!!!








We are hitting 114.9 a litre in some areas now, 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.





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: a





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 90p a LITRE RANGE





It's easy to make this happen. Just join this group and get all your FB
friends to join or forward as an email to everyone in your address
book, and buy your petrol at Shell, Asda,Tesco, Sainsburys, Morrisons
Jet etc. i.e.. boycott BP and Esso
















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It'll never work, not a chance. But since I don't buy from either of these two anyway, I will be complying.

and i dont either

Don’t be too surprised if this thread doesn’t get locked. A large part of the price of fuel is duty and that’s controlled by government policy, which it seems cannot be criticised. Singling out specific companies might also be frowned upon.

I don’t think we do “Militant” or “Sticking together” in this country, so I don’t believe this measure will achieve anything. An awful lot of people commute by car, in many cases over quite large distances, so many people are very fuel dependant. If it escalated to a serious protest, I suspect the oil companies would unite and that they could hold out longer than the average (Possibly debt ridden) commuter and the protesters would be a bit like the ten green bottles on the wall.

The other issue is (So a local garage owner told me) that much of the fuel comes from the same place and it just goes into different tankers and then different pumps. Perhaps the companies concerned add one or two different things to it; I don’t suppose the average punter would know or check.

I have to say that I feel we are now overly dependant on travelling and I am not sure that what we now do is sustainable. I live nine miles from my place of work and I do that mostly on a bicycle. There was a time when my trip to work would have been considered above average but I suspect it is now well below average. Then there are shopping habits. My local town centre is very run down. The shopping precinct (Built in the late 1960s at one end of the main street) has about thirty units, nine of which are vacant (And some of the occupied units contain banks or charity shops). Other towns in the area are the same and all new shopping developments are “Out of town” and car dependant. In many cases, the developments consist of just one large store.

Supposing it DID begin to work - these two would cut their prices by 2p, and the queue would be down the street. Then they would ease it back up.

Boycotting shell or esso wouldn't work. But shopping round everytime you need to fill up might. http://www.petrolprices.com/

obviously, dont drive a long way just to get cheap fuel!!!

And, harrass your MP about loweing fuel duty. In todays Britain, unless you live in the centre of a major city, the car is an indispensible form of transport.

It's still cheaper than beer, and that's mostly water!

i have just received this email and before i read this placed the suggestion elswhere so my questions have been answered here thanks.

The only answer is to walk and cycle more. In most of the Midlands, buses can be up to 10 times the price of driving a few miles.

I try not to get in the car "by choice" unless I can go to the tip, drop kiddo off at martial arts, get to the shop / get to my garage for a couple of hours all in one journey!
Mileage wise, visiting our friends and family account for the vast majority of my miles but I don't have an answer for that one, although my wife wonders why we can't have a weekend away without it being combined with collecting an ebay purchase!

As for fuel costs, compared to the atrocities happening in other parts of the world due to oil companys or energy related politics, the price we pay at the pump is minor by comparison.

les wrote:It's still cheaper than beer, and that's mostly water!

I've seen bottled water for sale at more than £1.20 a litre and people still bought it.

That's cheaper than Albright Bitter!!!

I use petrolprices.com comparison website. I usually buy fuel in bigger quantities, only small amounts if the price indicates there is some sense in it. Go Well, go Shell!

rayofleamington wrote:The only answer is to walk and cycle more.

I am sorry but the walk/cycle idea might work in the towns and cities but out here in the sticks you need a car - for everything. There are no busses and the local shop could be a 20 mile hike away. Try cycling to your local supermarket.
In almost all of these 'green' issues no one really considers those of us in remote rural areas

I'll be slightly risque. It might be OK cycling to the supermarket, its the cycling back!

rayofleamington wrote:The only answer is to walk and cycle more. In most of the Midlands, buses can be up to 10 times the price of driving a few miles.
-snip-

As for fuel costs, compared to the atrocities happening in other parts of the world due to oil companys or energy related politics, the price we pay at the pump is minor by comparison.

I agree with the first part, if practical. For the last 20 years when I was in my previous job, much of my commutting was by bike, I walked a few times in heavy snow and even jogged into work when in my fitness phase. I also spent years car- sharing or getting the bus into work. Nothing wrong with preserving resources and minimising waste of money. I also never moved more than 10 miloes from work- cycling distance.

However, alleged "atrocities" meaning our petrol has to be expensive does not hold water. This is not a valid argument because if oil companies really are oppressing the 3rd world (I doubt that is true) then the result should be cheaper petrol for us, not more expensive. That is a lose-lose situation. That just does not make any sense at all.

Basically the price of a barrel of oil has gone down recently, and yet petrol has gone up, so we are clearly being ripped off by the oil companies. But this pales in to insignificance to the 80% of the cost that goes to our government who waste it.

MikeHA4 wrote:I'll be slightly risque. It might be OK cycling to the supermarket, its the cycling back!

Oh I don't know!! My parents live above and behind the family business and one morning my mother asked me to collect some milk from Tescos on my way in to work. That involved only a detour of about a mile (Its normally a nine mile trip) so I put on the panniers and set off.

I live on the edge of Industrial South Wales and my parents live six or seven miles inside the Brecon Beacons National Park, which up to a point is a bit out in the sticks (Buses almost when they feel like it and a milkman who delivers when he feels like it, hence they get milk when they go shopping). I think I loaded up with about sixteen pints of milk (It was four large containers anyway). The main thing was the way the weight affected the handling of the bike but this wasn't the first time I had carried a load, so you just watch braking distances and cornering. The hills weren't too bad, although I am used to cycling and the bike I used has pretty low gears.

In all seriousness, I save quite a bit in fuel costs and also have to spend less time maintaining the car (Though more time maintaining the bikes - of which I have five but only two are used for work). I have to say I enjoy cycling anyway and it keeps me fit.

I forwarded the petrol e-mail to a friend who used to be in the petroleum industry. His reply was:

Having worked in the supply sales and distribution of oil products worldwide, I can tell you what you may not know. Morrisons, Tesco, Sainsbury etc all buy their petrol from the nearest major company's refinery-none of these make their own, so you would still be buying from BP, Exxon etc

Worse than that, there is great collusion between ALL producers. Check this scenario:-Shell has the only refinery here (Merseyside) BP has the only one near Glasgow (Ardrossan) Exxon has one near Swansea (Milford Haven). So to keep down their delivery costs, they all swap quotas so BP and Exxon pick up from Shell Ellesmere Port, Shell and Exxon from BP Ardrossan and Shell and BP from Exxon Milford Haven.

Of course you don't see marked vehicles of competitors running out of these depots, but there are hundreds of unmarked contractor road, rail, barge and coastal tankers picking up loads around the clock to deliver more locally.

Here's another thing that is going on. Under the guise of trying to stockpile products away from the Middle East in case of
any war over there affecting supplies, the major companies are buying, renting or financing the construction of millions of tons of tank storage worldwide. They are also continuing to build more ocean supertankers which add even more to their storage capacity.

This enables them to actually CONTROL the output of oil from the middle east by reducing their purchases from the OPEC countries when they put their prices up, because they have built their stockpiles up sufficiently to keep supplies going. But here's the hooker-the Brent Crude price quoted at that time is the one the Major Suppliers apply to their deliveries, even though they bought it when the Opec price was lower!

What happens next? As they reduce their imports from Opec, their storage supplies gradually run down, but long before they run out, the OPEC countries usually reduce ther prices again. If they don't, it doesn't matter- the Majors have already made their killing. If they do, the Majors say it takes weeks for the crude to get to the petrol pumps, by which time they have cranked DOWN the refinery output to increase the spot price and of course build their supplies of CHEAPER oil from OPEC.QED!

To get prices down, we all need to either use less overall by cycling walking etc, OR build our own individual storage capacity to do exactly to the majors what they are doing to Opec and us......