Consumer Protection or Brand Courtesy: Case of the Oil & Gas Retail – Part 1
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Stop at any of the 99.9% CNG filling stations of PSO, Shell, Caltex, Attock Oil in Pakistan and you will get robbed of your hard earned money…well voluntarily though! Yes thats what you do to yourself when you do not get the worth of CNG that you actually pay for. Here is how.
Majority of the CNG dispensing machines installed at the CNG stations through out Pakistan do not have automatic meters to give the motorists “exact fill for their bill” (could actually be the name of an awareness campaign). Every time a motorist drives into a CNG filling stations they end up paying atleast 50 paisas/cents more than the dispensed amount of gas. The station attendants manually stop the dispenser and despite doing it for years and years it is amazing that they have not mastered the art of stopping the dispenser at the exact reading (or atleast very close).
In monetary terms this means accumulation of un-accounted earnings amounting to millions for hi-frequency stations, evey month! Where are the regulatory bodies, civic societies and the consumer sense?!
The solution is simple and so is the reason behind this malpractice. All that needs to be done is to install these manual CNG machines with modular meters that would do the job. The reason for not doing is our “ignorance” (for the illiterate) and withering “self-disrespect” (for the learned?!) that we accept being robbed every day of our lives. Its so funny since we have set a monetray limit for being robbed i.e. in cents.
6:58 pm
quite interesting observation. but at the same time even if they are able to return the money let ssay 21 paisa. what would i do with it. partly its impossible (My thinking but off course i don;t know if machines are available that can do that) because when we ask them to fill the tank to full it can stop at any time even if the meter is automatic. basically its the accumulation that is causing this amount to sum up to this. but they might start giving customers some benefit of this extra money as a show of good faith like giving juice at every 10th visit or so
11:25 pm
I got the sweeter end of this recently, where the “inaccurate manual stopping of the dispenser” caused me to save a whole Rs.3!
Er… guess I showed them?!
The trick I used? I paid them in advance — then they were too ashamed to ask for Rs3 extra.
12:37 am
Well actually I used 99.9% intentionally. The rest 0.1% do have auto-meters that stop at the exact amount if told by the motorist in advance.
The absence of this realization is exactly what I am pointing at! The formula for the motorist to tell the near exact required fill is easy. Just note once what is a full tank’s worth for your vehicle and then divide it over the “gas level indicator dots” displayed on the CNG switch kit. These days all cars, big or small, have these indicators. The next time the motorist can safely quote the value of fill required.
Just to mention the 0.1% auto-metered dispensers installed, as observed by myself, are that of TESLA. They are touch screen and have the same options for value, weight and free fill just as the liquid fuel dispensers.
12:51 am
Qazi’s suggestion is quite creative but is party dependent and can not be accounted for. Commercial standards should dictate regulated and measurable returns against payments for a mutually determined transaction within the agreed time. In this case, on the spot!
To understand the implications presume that one needs to get the vehicle filled 5 times a day meaning a loss on average of Rs.2 minimum multiplied to a loss of Rs.60 or more per month translated to Rs.720 per year. This can go into thousands and millions for companies employing larger vehicle pools like the rent-a-car, freight movers, couriers etc.
Or imagine your cell phone company starts charging 30 paisas extra per call because there is a delay in the main call router’s meter to sense your call termination. Surely you won’t accept that even if you could pick up a chocolate bar or a chilled cola from their centre after every 50 calls