The Changing Face Of Fuel Retailing

Fuel prices are up again –back in the summer a litre of unleaded could be bought, if you shopped around, for £1.05 or so. Today, the cheapest anywhere is £1.20 and you need to hunt to find it for that – most outlets are £1.22-£1.24 or more.

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However, if we look at the figures in a bit more detail, things aren’t as bad as the headlines might suggest. For starters, although £1.22 is more than we were paying back in the spring, it’s been much dearer in the recent past – in May 2013 we were paying £1.33 a litre. And if we look back to the classic era; when the writer started buying petrol in 1976 and it was sold in gallons, a gallon of two-star cost around 75p – four star was 1-2p more. 77p in 1976 is equal to £5.78 today, and if we divide that by 4.54 to convert the gallons into litres, we get a price of £1.27 a litre – actually slightly more than we pay today.

So in real terms fuel is, despite recent increases, now cheaper  than it was in the 1970s – hard to believe I know, but the figures don’t lie.