OPIS reported this week that retail fuel margins declined for the third straight week. Fuel margins now stand at $0.192 per gallon. That is a $0.022 per gallon decrease from last week.
Retail fuel margins have lost over $0.17 per gallon over the past three weeks and now stand at levels last seen in early October.
The city of Chicago has selected a new fleet of garbage trucks to be electric vehicles rather than hybrids or compressed natural gas vehicles. The award is based on research using a city bus with the same technology from Motiv Power Systems, the contract award winner based out of the San Francisco Bay Area. Conclusions from the research are that operations costs will be reduced by 50% over an eight year period.
The range of these trucks will be 60 miles.
From a fuel price management perspective, this award won’t cause even a ripple in the fuel volume market, but it is one more data point showing how overall fuel demand is likely to decrease as municipalities and other government fleet vehicles start using alternative fuels besides gasoline and diesel.
The article announcing the award may be find here.
For the week ending November 16, 2012, OPIS reports that retail fuel margins dropped again. This is the second straight week of fuel margin declines.
Fuel margins now stand at $0.214 per gallon. That represents a decrease of $0.078 per gallon, resulting in a combined decrease over the past two weeks of over $0.15 per gallon.
Fuel margins are now back to levels last seen in mid-October, over four weeks ago.
In their quarterly results released today, Susser Holdings announced their retail fuel volumes were up year over year, while retail fuel margins were lower.
Average fuel volumes sold per store per month increased 6.6% to approximately 132,000 gallons per store. But retail fuel gross margins declined from $0.277 per gallon from the same period last year to $0.201 per gallon this quarter.
From a fuel price management perspective, these financial results hit home the point that it’s nearly impossible to make gains in both retail fuel volumes and retail fuel margins. Pull the lever to increase volumes, and fuel margins will have to be sacrificed. Change strategies to improve fuel margins, and fuel volumes will suffer.
Only with a fuel price management optimization solution like PriceAdvantage can the fuel manager keep a close watch on both levers to achieve corporate goals.
According to the latest OPIS report, retail fuel margins reversed their three week trend and lost ground this week. Fuel margins dropped $0.076 to an average margin of $0.292 per gallon. This single week drop erases all fuel margin gains over the past two weeks.