NJ Stations Charged with Illegal Fuel Price Changes

  • NJ Stations Charged with Illegal Fuel Price Changes

    Convenience Store News reports that three New Jersey gas stations are being charged with illegal price changes after Hurricane Irene. The stations are accused of raising their fuel prices multiple times in one day which is illegal in the state of New Jersey, and could result in fines of $1500 each. The State Office of Weights and Measures also investigated the gas stations for raising prices more than 10%, what New Jersey calls price gouging.

    Fuel Pricing solutions such as PriceAdvantage can help in situations like this in three ways:

    1. Keep control of fuel price changes at Headquarters. The Fuel Price Management solution PriceAdvantage can be configured to remove the Store Manager from the fuel price change process, and initiate all fuel price changes only at headquarters. This means no unauthorized fuel price changes starting at the store.
    2. Set price change thresholds. PriceAdvantage allows price changes to be kept below the set threshold, meaning a price change can never be more than the set percentage over the current price. In this case, if the threshold is set to 9%, any price change of more than 9% would be rejected as unauthorized.
    3. Reduce audit time. PriceAdvantage provides a series of reports making it easy to show auditors the price change history at each store. That means when an audit is inevitable, the time it takes to provide the needed information is reduced to minutes.

    These New Jersey stores did not have PriceAdvantage in place, but if they had, their troubles would have likely been reduced, and possibly eliminated entirely.

    The original NACS article is here.

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