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UK fuel shortage worsens as industry chief warns ‘people will go without’
- rastafang 5y agowhat about toilet paper?
- blibble 5y agoanother media induced round of panic buying
- csomar 5y ago> Yet repeated attempts by authorities to spread calm and urge against panic buying have had the opposite effect. I think it's the government... but a reasonably functional supply chain won't let this happen. Most people do not panic by news; but they'll panic buy when they find out that some stations have run out of fuel.
- sprafa 5y agoWas told by someone in the UK trucking industry this is mindless panic as some people have moved from HGV fuel trucks to regular as the salaries on regular trucking caught up with fuel trucks (and fuel trucks are far more dangerous so people just jumped ship). One particular agency that has a big market share in the industry seems to be the issue (he said). Seems like they lost tons of drivers and havent raised salaries to meet lowered interest from truckers who can now make the same money from not carrying what’s effectively a mobile bomb.
- plazmatic 5y agoYet with most supply chains utilizing lean strategies, you'd think they could respond quicker to the sudden increases or decreases in demand. Somethings not right here.
- Johnny555 5y agoa reasonably functional supply chain won't let this happen. No reasonable supply chain will withstand panic buying
- blibble 5y agofrom the article: > Mr Madderson said a government media leak on BP’s earlier decision to restrict fuel deliveries to about 100 of its 1,200 stations had been largely responsible for the mayhem. > “That leak to a broadcaster has brought about the quite catastrophic situation we’re now in, where there is panic buying,” he said. the UK has ~8500 petrol stations... around 1% had a shortage before the media amplified everything
- sprafa 5y agoPretty much.
- Cryptonic 5y agoSame what happened with toilet paper last year in Germany. I never felt such a panic. This is a taste of what collapse will feel like. Only that there will be nothing to panic buy again, the week after.
- tonyedgecombe 5y agoIt's the media, it's garbage in the UK: https://media.fyre.co/cZHuurMUTRyvkgongrtq_the-sun-front-page-24-09-2021_1632432085.jpg https://media.fyre.co/cZHuurMUTRyvkgongrtq_the-sun-front-pag...
- csomar 5y ago> Yet repeated attempts by authorities to spread calm and urge against panic buying have had the opposite effect. Did that ever work in any country?
- tarboreus 5y agoWhere there's obviously no reason to panic you don't need to go on TV and say, hey, don't panic.
- Arnt 5y agoSure. It's a classic rhetorical technique, and the conditions for it to work are well known. It's a variant of "trust me", and that works if and only if the audience considers you trustworthy. So it wasn't terribly likely to work for someone like Boris Johnson, whose recent history chiefly consists of using bonmots to deflect blame for a series of failures. But it worked for Angela Merkel six years ago, when she said "wir schaffen das" about an impending crisis, and the great majority trusted her judgment.
- bsd44 5y agoYes it does, in every other country. This is exactly what happened last year with the toilet paper "shortage" where people emptied the stock by panic buying and then the food "shortage" when Curry's went out of freezers because people were panic buying and stockpiling food. These images could only be seen in the UK, no other European country had this problem. Now it's happening again. Exactly the same. The British are morons, on average, at best, hopefully.
- _Wintermute 5y agoI'm British and agree that our general public are morons, but I was living in France at the time of coronavirus panic buying, and it definitely happened in other European countries. Pasta aisles laid bare, fights at checkout queues - stupidity has no borders.
- bsd44 5y agoIf you were in the UK at the time you would've seen much worse than pasta shortage, eg. people were getting stabbed in London over toilet paper. There are times when it's completely acceptable to panic. This is not one of those times. A shortage of anything in this country is a self-fulfilling prophecy. What these panic-buying idiots don't understand is that their stockpiling of fuel will have negative consequences for the entire economy. Entities who really depend on fuel, such as delivery drivers, will have to stop working which will actually cause a shortage of goods and services, which will fuel the panic even further. This madness is created by the people, brainless morons who read The Sun like Muslims read Koran.
- baggy_trough 5y agoWhy don't they raise the price until supply and demand balance?
- sundaeofshock 5y agoThat would penalize the poor.
- hpoe 5y agoSo would not being able to get fuel because there isn't enough of it because no one allowed supply and demand to work.
- sundaeofshock 5y agoSo you are suggesting that in order to help the poor buy fuel, we need to increase the price of fuel?
- maxk42 5y agoIn order to help the people that need fuel the most the price of fuel should be increased. It's a basic self-healing mechanism.
- esarbe 5y agoBut that's the problem of the market. The fuel would not go to the people that need it the most, it will just go to the people that can afford to pay the most. Market allocations happen not on need but on liquidity. In that aspect it's fundamentally inferior to that other mechanism that distributes according to need and from ability.
- baggy_trough 5y agoSince the “other mechanism” is that of the most murderous ideology of the past hundred years, I think we can rule it out.
- mettamage 5y ago> Yet repeated attempts by authorities to spread calm and urge against panic buying have had the opposite effect. IMO academia should research this. There are probably enough events + news on those events in this world. If the research is already done then I urge policy makers + mainstream media to read such research carefully.
- throwaway0a5e 5y agoWhat is there to research? It seems obvious that people don't trust the authorities to have their best interests at heard when the authorities offer suggestions.
- mettamage 5y agoIf no messaging is better, then they should do that. If there is a certain form of messaging that is better, then they should do that.
- Arnt 5y agoRhetoric was studied a loooong time ago. This thing is simple. You build trust by being right, or you can use it (and perhaps wear it down) by relying on that trust. Sometimes when you use people's trust in you, you can resolve the problem using that trust as a tool, but if the problem happens anyway, you wear down your trust. A particular kind of organisation suggested that there'd be problems due to lack of fruit pickers, government said no, the organisation turned out to be right and it could be seen in the shops. A similar kind of organisation suggested that there'd be problems with haulage and transport, government said the problems would be manageable and managed, the organisation turned out to be right and it could be seen in the shops. Now a third organisation is saying the same kind of thing, this time about fuel.
- Johnny555 5y agoThe good news is you can only really fill up once. You’ve got to use the fuel, so this should be a short-term thing,” he said. But you can fill up gas cans, 5 gallon buckets, even plastic bags and buy a months worth of fuel in a day. Last time this happened in the USA I don’t even know what people were going to do with what they were buying, like a 250 gallon tank of fuel… resell it?
- tzs 5y agoWhat are the laws on fuel storage there? In at least some states in the US it is only legal to store it in approved containers, although I don't know if the gas stations would stop you if you tried to fill up a bucket or plastic bag.
- BuildTheRobots 5y agoPetrol/Paraffin: 10L in plastic, 20L in metal, no more than 30L max. Diesel is exempt. https://app.croneri.co.uk/questions-and-answers/carrying-petrol-or-diesel-work-vehicles https://app.croneri.co.uk/questions-and-answers/carrying-pet...
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Haegin 5y agoI think I remember last time there was a fuel shortage in the UK and people were panic buying there were several stories of people dying from fumes or house fires started after people did stupid things like storing petrol in saucepans in their kitchen.
- atatatat 5y agoWasn't Darwin from the UK?
- zabzonk 5y agoWhenever you hear a cabinet minister saying "let me be clear on this...", you know things are going down the tubes.
- LurkingPenguin 5y agoAt this rate, there will be a shortage of tubes soon.
- Lammy 5y agoIt’s more like a series of trucks.
- nate_meurer 5y agoBig trucks.
- Lammy 5y agoEhh nobody really uses Jumbo Tires except in point-to-point roads.
- bostik 5y agoOr to paraphrase a Finnish saying: a looming disaster has not been confirmed until it has been officially denied.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Cryptonic 5y agoOh, the country that banned union strikes long ago suddenly realizes that the world depends on workers.
- Cryptonic 5y agoSo you are telling us electric cars, loaded by home solar power have no issues?
- neilwilson 5y agoOnly that electricity providers are going bust on a daily basis. This is the UK we're talking about and it's nearly October. You'd struggle to power a flashlight from solar power at this time of year.
- dumb_throw 5y agoIt's a little odd that Bulb, who boast about supplying "100% renewable" power, are affected by gas prices.
- MattPalmer1086 5y agoElectricity is from renewables, gas is made green through offsetting. They supply both. Edit: at least in the UK, they only claim green, not fully renewable.
- dumb_throw 5y agoRight, so they should have a competitive advantage over those "traditional" fossil-fuel burning electricity suppliers. That is, they can continue selling renewable electricity unaffected by gas prices.
- MattPalmer1086 5y agoIt does seem like they would have an advantage there, although they would still be affected.
- shalmanese 5y agoWell, yeah, because electricity is fungible. Other power providers that can't get the electricity they need from gas are turning to renewables, driving up prices for everyone.