With fuel at cost price, what real savings on a full tank?

At the request of the government, major distributors will play the game of selling fuel locally. cost price at least up to the end of the year.

It was, after the bitter failure of the proposal to sell fuel to loss, the government's new hobby horse. Following; Following the appeal of the President of the Republic Emmanuel Macron, on Sunday September 24 during the television news of TF1 and France 2, the major distributors unanimously accepted the request. to sell their fuel to cost price. Most brands were already doing this; for a few months now there are major operations on certain weekends. This will always be the case for several of them (Casino, Intermarché, Auchan…), sometimes in a more repeated manner, others, like Leclerc and Carrefour, already have announced that they will do it every day and until at the end of the year, at the end of the year from September 29.

If this is a small victory for the government, which is working hard to activate all the levers likely to reduce inflation, what will it actually change? for the consumer, the first concerned; by the rise in prices for more than two years? Unfortunately, not much. To fully understand, it is interesting to know what you pay when you fill the tank of your vehicle:

• the price of crude oil
• the production costs at the same time the refinery to transform the raw product into gasoline
• transportation of the finished product to fuel depots
• taxes, which represent more than 50 ;% of total cost
• the operating cost and the margins made by the distributor

If the government would soon like to obtain from refiners a reduction in their production costs, it is the last line, that concerning distributors, which interests us in the context of the sale of fuel to the public. cost price. Contact by our colleagues at Capital, Olivier Gantois, spokesperson for oil companies in France, said this week that "the net margin of distributors, that is to say their benefit, fice, is of the order of 1 cent per liter. So when we talk about cost price we are logically talking about a price drop of 1 cent per liter, or even a maximum of 2 cents for large service stations, and nothing at all for the smaller ones." For those who imagined that the sale at agrave; The cost price would allow a saving of several euros to be made. every fill-up is inevitably a cold shower.

While the price of a liter of Unleaded 95-E10 and that of diesel are equivalent this week, at 1.94 euros on average in France, sales at The cost price would therefore bring it down to around 1.92, 1.93 euros in the service stations which will play the game. the limit of the ridiculous, since thesaving on a 50 liter tank will be around 1 euro for the consumer. What pushes us to ask: everything for ça?