I’ve been keeping my gas receipts for quite some time. Every so often I get geeky with these and enter them in a spreadsheet and calculate my fuel economy. Over time this has allowed me to compare the various vehicles I’ve owned, winter vs summer, city vs highway travel, etc. For example, when I changed jobs and started taking the GO train to work, I noticed that my fuel economy got worse due to more local driving and less highway. (This was more than made up for my the drastic decrease in km’s driven.) My latest test will be the impact of our bikes on the roof during our trip to the east coast. Intuitively, its going to be ugly.
So the other day I filled up at Shell and went in to get a snack and drink, adding almost $3 to my bill. When I got the receipt I realized that the snacks were not itemized. Instead, the number of litres had been adjusted upward so that the total came out to include them.
It makes me wonder how many times that has happened in the time I’ve been calculating my fuel use, and how much error is now built in? It also makes me wonder if there is something wrong with this picture? Is Shell or the local station owner benefiting from this? How does this affect their inventory if their total receipts show they sold more gas than they had?
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Oh you make me laugh. You are an engineer after all !
Keep up the good work Glenn and thanks for sharing your thoughts.
RJ
I’m not sure what the advantage would be for the station owner for doing it this way? I’ve had some gas station clients in the past, and they were typically accountable to the oil company for the amount of fuel used per the counters inside the pump, not what they recorded in the cash register.
The only thing I can think of is he might be trying to scam the tax authorities and not the oil company. The snack you purchased would have both GST and PST on it, but the gas just GST. If he added the total charge including both taxes to the bill (the amount the customer is expecting to pay), but added it by adjusting the fuel volume, his sytem would record fewer taxes collected to remit at the end of the month. It’s not a lot of money on one snack sale, but if done on every sale, it would certainly add up. And if he’s dishonest enough to do this, he probably doesn’t care about the accuracy of his inventory records, which would be broken in the process. I also wonder what else he might be trying to steal–perhaps from his customers? I think I’d be looking for a different gas station to shop at.
By the way, I track my fuel purchases too. Since I purchased my current vehicle in ’04, it graphs like a sine curve, with the most inefficient peaks in Jan/Feb of each year, and the most efficient valleys in the summer. A difference of 1.75 L/100km between the worst and best months. It appears the lighter traffic patterns of the summer more than make up for my use of A/C.