The tone is set. A few weeks after its last charge, the consumer association CLCV – Consumption Housing and Living Environment – once again points the finger at fuel distributors. While many French people take the road to vacation, she denounces, in a press release, “explosive” monthly gross margins for gasoline and diesel, between January 2022 and June 2023.
To calculate the earnings of the distributors, the CLCV looked at the difference between the price excluding fuel taxes and the price at the exit of the refinery and “therefore realized a fraction of the total price which goes to the distributor”. However, despite a recent “slump”, the gross margin remained, in June, at 25.4 cents per liter for SP 95 and 23.4 cents per liter of diesel, according to Ufip data, cited by the association. Figures that have “not yet reached the normal range of 15 to 18 cents”, stings the association.
For its president, Jean-Yves Mano, supermarkets – which represent approximately 64% of the French fuel distribution market – “have oriented their advertising in recent months on the anti-inflation quarter and have been very discreet on the part fuel”. “They have to assume that they have recomposed their margins for three or four months because today, nothing justifies this gross margin”, he abounds. “Large retailers and oil groups keep saying that they are committed to purchasing power. It is time to translate this into action. They must stop procrastinating, ”intimates his organization, in a press release.
Statements that are brushed aside by large retail groups, such as System U: “We say it and we repeat it, fuel is a loss leader on which we do not generate margins”, indicates -we. If the CLCV mentions a gross margin of more than 25 cents per liter of SP 95, Système U rather emphasizes a net margin of “1.5 to 2 cents” per litre. “Between the gross and the net, there are taxes and refunds, specifies the group, a service station costs for example between 300,000 and 400,000 euros”. System U recommends to the consumer defense association to turn instead to “oil distributors”, who offer the liter of diesel “fifteen cents more expensive” than in supermarkets.
But, again, the gas station attendants ensure that “their margins have not increased” and that they are less than ten cents. “We suffered from increases in the price of energy and we had to increase our staff”, justifies Francis Pousse, national president of the fuel and new energy distribution branch of the Mobilians union. “If there is an abuse, it is not with us that it happens,” he adds. The representative also specifies that it is necessary to put “the figures in their context” with “negative margins which occurred last year” and “the application of government rebates” in service stations.
Whatever the actors, the CLCV asks them for “immediate cost price operations”, so that “households are not punctured when they go on vacation”. A request to which certain groups have already responded, such as Leclerc, with a cost price operation “every Friday, Saturday and Sunday, from June 30 to August 13”. Intermarché also launched similar operations on July 7 and 8, August 18, 19, 28 and 29, and September 1 and 2. System U also proposed this measure on the weekend of July 8 and will renew it “early August”.