The American Petroleum Institute reported that gasoline deliveries, a measure of consumer gasoline demand, increased 3.0% to 9.0 million barrels per day, the second monthly increase in demand since February 2011.
From a fuel price management perspective, the fuel volume sales benchmark is higher year over year.
PriceAdvantage customer Sheetz opened another new store in North Carolina. The new store is one of ten new stores Sheetz plans to open in North Carolina this year.
Sheetz uses PriceAdvantage to manage their closed loop fuel price management process, including to their Skyline signs.
There is a growing list of articles in the press predicting that fuel prices are going to drop in the coming months. Both a AAA report and a report from the US EIA say fuel prices should begin to drop, with regular unleaded fuel leveling out to $3.95 per gallon.
Fuel prices for regular unleaded from April to September should be $3.95 per gallon according to the US EIA. Average prices for that same period last year were $3.71.
In the OPIS Retail Fuel Watch, OPIS reported retail fuel prices dropped $0.8 cents per gallon nationally, the lowest level since March 27.
The most common fuel price is $3.799, with just under 19% of the stores across the nation having fuel prices above $4.00 per gallon.
PriceAdvantage allows you to display in your fuel price management system OPIS Radius report information about specific competitor stores, so you can compare your prices to the competition and quickly react with price changes as needed.
According to the most recent MasterCard SpendingPulse study, fuel consumption declined 3% over the past 52 weeks. That equates to 4.2 billion gallons.
According to John Gamel, who oversees MasterCard SpendingPulse’s weekly consumption report, part of the reason for the decline is that people have purchased vehicles with better gas mileage. Average gas mileage is now 24 miles per gallon, compared to 20 mpg in 2008.
Experts agree this trend of declining fuel consumption is bound to continue. From a fuel price management perspective, it’s clear that as convenience stores continue to fight for an ever shrinking fuel market, competition will continue to be tough. Only the c-store chains with the most effective fuel pricing technology will survive.
This information was reported by Convenience Store News in an article here.
The March 2012 issue of NPN magazine and www.NPNweb.com has a great article about the strategic importance of the integration between electronic price signs and fuel price management systems. Stewart Spinks, CEO of The Spinx Company, and long time PriceAdvantage and Skyline sign customer, is featured in the article.
“We can move very quickly as costs change,” Spinks says. “Some suppliers do multi-day changes. Central cost monitoring and speed of price changes can ‘signal the street’ of our desire to pass on increases or decreases to the market. If competitors don’t react within two hours, Spinx can react expediently. Furthermore, the staff does not have to stop serving customers to physically go ‘post the prices.’”
With PriceAdvantage and Skyline electronic price signs, Spinx has a comprehensive closed loop fuel price management solution, allowing fuel price optimization from cost and competitor price monitoring at the store and at HQ, to rapid deployment of those prices, optimized for each market.
The full NPN online article may be found here.
