On my last-but-one trip to the UK (December 2008) I was there for two weeks and every day when I went out and came back, I went past a petrol/gas station and the price was the same every single time for the entire two weeks.

In Germany on the other hand, it's completely different. The prices here change up to 10 times a day. All stations have electronic signs for the price, they really would go crazy if they had to climb up a ladder to change the prices with how often they have to do it. The prices vary up to 5% intraday for no apparent reason. There's no news of wars, no news from opec, nothing whatsoever happens in the oil world but they change the prices anyway. I can drive past the station on the edge of our village at 10:00am on the way to the post office in the next village and see the price at ?1.36 and come back at 10:20 and find it's now priced at ?1.46. What happened to cause this massive rise? Nothing. The next morning it can be at ?1.45, be ?1.40 by lunchtime and ?1.34 the next morning. It's absolutely bizarre.

The only trend we've observed (and take advantage of) is that the cheapest time of the week is always monday morning. I filled up this morning at 10:00am at ?1.37 and by 5pm today I'm told it was back up to ?1.47. The only thing you can be sure of is that the next time you go past a particular station, whether it's in a couple of hours or a couple of days, is that the price will not be the same.

The station I buy most of my gas from just the other day went up 12 cents a gallon. It seems that they will raise their prices then it will start dropping a penny or two but rarely ever getting down to the original price. One other thing I noticed, back when for whatever reason prices went so high there was a 10cent difference between grades, say regular was $2.25 mid level was $2.35 and premium was $2.45 now the difference is 15 cents between grades. What's up with that?

For me it's not even the actual cost of the fuel that's an issue, I don't do many miles (due to working from home) so it's not like the high fuel prices impact my budget. It's the audacity of the gas stations to just raise and lower the prices up to 10 times a day just based on how much they feel they can screw out of the passing customers. A bit like McDonalds adding 10% to all their prices around lunchtime and putting them back down when things quiet down. :thumbsdown: :confused: :unsure: