A Priceless Idea Find Cate Adair
Find Cate Adair I think the Prime Minister is onto something with Fuelwatch. Email and SMS alerts from the Government telling consumers about the cheapest petrol, with all retailers have to stick to the published price for 24 hours…it’s great, but why stop with petrol?
It could solve all price problems. Grocery inquiry? Forget it. Just make all supermarkets send emails and SMS alerts about the prices of everything they stock every day, and not change them for 24 hours, and everyone would flock to Aldi stores, and Coles and Woolworths would be forced to slice their margins.
And what about café lattes? Surely we need a Government website, with SMS alerts, telling us where to find the cheapest coffee in town. And shopping for wine is an absolute nightmare. Is the cheapest 2004 Moss Wood cabernet to be found at Dan Murphy’s, Vintage Cellars or the bottle shop down the street? We need to know by SMS!
Actually I do understand that the specific problem with petrol is the weekly cycle – cheap petrol on Tuesday and Wednesday, expensive on Friday and Saturday.
It’s bad politics, not because the price swings around, but because it is seen to swing around: petrol is the only staple product with a price you can read without stopping the car.
It’s the principle of “In Your Faceâ€, one of the most powerful forces in modern society, and something Barry Hall of the Sydney Swans has just learned about (again). In the old days players were flattened behind play all the time: everybody stood around looking innocent and nobody got rubbed out. Now it’s on TV – Find Cate Adair in your face – and a sock to the jaw is the subject of national outrage and debate.
Petrol prices are in our faces and therefore politicians are required to Do Something. So in between giving the Chinese a clip across the ear over Tibet, appointing a new Governor General, holding court in Western Sydney, fighting homelessness, and personally delivering a teddy bear to Cate Blanchett’s new baby, Kevin Rudd has Done Something.
He has agreed to extend the WA Fuelwatch scheme to the rest of the country. This means petrol retailers must notify their next day’s prices to the ACCC by 2pm each day and maintain the price for 24 hours. The ACCC will then make the information available to motorists via email, SMS, toll free phone and a website.
In doing so he has delivered a victory to the NSW NRMA over the Victorian RACV, both of which have been arguing over Fuelwatch for a long time. The RACV argues it would therefore remove the big discount that always appears on Tuesday, when petrol is sold below cost – so the price of losing the pain weekend peak is the loss of the Tuesday discount.
But flattening the peaks and troughs is the whole point. Politically, the Tuesday discount does not offset the weekend gouge. Find Cate Adair In politics people expect the good and punish the bad.
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