Let's assume you're a typical American, typically scornful of the oil and gas industry. You don't work for the industry. You don't know much about it. In fact, your only direct contact with the industry occurs when you buy gasoline.
Most of what you think about the oil and gas business relates to the price of gasoline. On that subject your perspective comes from vague memories about the Standard Oil trust and embedded suspicion that when the price rises distressfully somebody is cheating you.
So you and your prejudices are driving in, say, suburban Houston, and you need to buy fuel for your car. Outside a convenience store, you spot an illuminated sign advertising a gasoline price of $3.09/gal. Because that's on the low side of prices you've seen lately, you steer to a pump, park, get out, scan your credit card, insert the nozzle, and prepare to select the fuel grade.
And the price is $3.16/gal.
What? The sign said $3.09/gal.
You check the sign. Sure enough, the big, illuminated, red number is $3.09. But below it, in small painted letters you'd notice while driving only at the risk of causing an accident, appears the word "Cash."
Gotcha!
You got lured into the station by big, bright numbers but got scammed for 7¢/gal by the fine print. What do you think about the oil and gas industry now?
It's a trend
This writer, who knows more about the oil and gas industry than the typical American—and thinks more positively about it—had precisely this experience recently.
It was a Shell station. It's a Shell station that will refuel no more vehicles in the Tippee fleet.
Once burned by fine print, a person starts reading fine print. Shell, it seems, is not the lone practitioner of this unseemly switcheroo.
Since that unhappy encounter with the Shell brand, this fuel consumer has spotted an Exxon store using the same marketing trick. Several Chevron outlets display a variation: The big illuminated number at the top of the price sign applies, according to the fine print, to holders of Chevron cards. The higher, middle number is the price lesser creatures pay.
This seems to be a trend. It's not a good one.
Most gasoline retailers aren't owned by the oil companies whose brands they brandish. Most are owned by wholesalers or franchise owners, many of which are small businesses for which credit card fees might mean the difference between profit and loss.
But fuel consumers don't care about ownership. Most of them assume Shell owns Shell stations, ExxonMobil owns Exxon stations, Chevron owns Chevron stations. When fooled by an advertised price that turns out low, they feel cheated by Shell, by ExxonMobil, by Chevron.
And the next time some opportunistic lawmaker brays about price gouging or calls for punishing taxation of the oil industry, baited-and-switched motorists will have one more reason to think Shell, ExxonMobil, and Chevron are just getting what they deserve.
For a chronically unpopular industry, marketing needs to yield to politics—starting at what for most Americans is the only point of personal contact.
The top number
Here's the deal: The top number on those signs at retail outlets is the price of gasoline with the lowest octane rating, the number on which many if not most motorists base decisions whether to drive in or drive by, regardless of how they'll pay. Retailers shouldn't play games with that number.
Numbers lower on the sign can be prices of middle or premium gasoline grades and, at the bottom, diesel. Motorists looking for those products read labels.
But the top number is the decision benchmark. It shouldn't conspire in misdirection. Retailers with financial margins jeopardized by card fees need to raise prices or sell more lotto tickets.
The oil and gas industry's margin of political acceptability is too thin. Street-level tricks with gasoline prices can only shrink it more.
