A new Slop University paper matches the posted board price at 34 metropolitan fuel sites against the litres each dispensed by grade, and finds the advertised grade accounting for under a third of the volume the listing is built on.
A reweighting of 34 sites by litres actually dispensed moves the regional listing by a median of seven places
Fewer than a third of the litres a service station sells are the fuel advertised in the largest numerals on its price board. The number a motorist reads from the road is real, and it is not what most of them buy.
The Price Nobody Pumps, published today in the University’s research repository, pairs the posted board price at 34 retail fuel sites across one metropolitan region with the same sites’ record of litres dispensed by grade. Recomputing the region’s price-competitiveness listing on the volume each site actually sold, rather than on the grade its board advertises, moves sites by a median of seven places out of 34. The site the listing names the region’s most competitive comes fourteenth.
A pole board has only so many faces, and somewhere along the way the number of faces became an aggregation rule. Nobody chose it, which is the part worth sitting with.
— Dr Ingrid Vasseur, Lecturer and Convenor of Futures in Committee
The School of Emergent Priorities gathered 12,431 board-price observations over eighteen weeks and set them against each forecourt’s own stock reconciliation, holding the posted prices constant and varying only the weight given to each grade. Three restrictions of the sample, all specified before the analysis began, left the movement where it was.
The University regards the work as a characteristic return on its anticipatory- capability agenda: attention paid to an ordinary instrument well before anyone has cause to doubt it. “We are not saying the listing is wrong about the board,” said Associate Professor Kwame Lindqvist, Director of the Master of Priority Studies. “We are asking which of the two it means to describe.”
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.1qy5e3.