Sticking it to The Man!

Here's a thing that has happened to me irritatingly often: I fill my car up with diesel at our local petrol station and then head off to London, usually to see a client. Because the supermarkets appear to have decimated the population of petrol stations in Greater London, in all the time I'm there, I don't get around to filling the car up again and so, on my way back north, I'll find myself somewhere on the M40 faced with the prospect of using a motorway service station to refuel. And the pricing infuriates me. I feel like I'm being ripped off.

I mean, I get that the service stations probably charge the petrol companies a lot to have their pumps there but presumably they do it because they want the volume of sales. Surely there must be enough custom that they don't need to charge an extra 10p per litre to make the enterprise profitable?

Today, I was determined not to put myself through the self-abasement of going into the services to be voluntarily ripped off and instead I turned off at Bicester and went to find a petrol station. It did, admittedly, add eight miles and fifteen minutes to my journey but I did also save five pounds. But it really wasn't about the money, it was about not being ripped off (if that's not too subtle a distinction).

Later, when I stopped for a rest, I took this shot: I'd only paid 128.9 :-)