Discount Fuel Vouchers Revisited

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A couple of years ago I wrote about my dislike for supermarket petrol discount vouchers.

My perspective still remains the same: at some point someone has to pay for the “discount”, and that someone always ends up being the consumer.

Whether it’s higher grocery prices, higher pump prices, or purely through the “vendor lock-in” effect, somewhere the consumer loses out. Almost every supermarket/petrol station chain has discount vouchers these days, so it looks like the vouchers are here to stay. (In a way the voucher saturation is identical to having no vouchers. For example, as soon as Woolworths offers a higher discount rate, Coles follows. You might as well not have them at all.)

The interesting thing to note is the effect discount vouchering is having on the branding of petrol companies.

Since my family regularly shops at a Coles supermarket (who have a nasty habit of discontinuing lines of products I want to buy and replacing them with their own branded, usually inferior, version), we have Shell discount vouchers coming out our arses.

We don’t actively look for “Shell” petrol stations though, we look for “Coles” stations. The Coles brand has effectively consumed the Shell brand for me. I imagine a similar thing happens for other discounting partners.

I wonder if this is the effect that the petrol companies had in mind. They spend millions (billions?) of dollars a year to promote their brand, their badge, their trademark, and yet they’ve thrown it all away for a few cents a litre discount.