What do petrol prices end in?
Almost all of them end in nine tenths of a penny. That much is not news. What the count shows is the exception: a second, smaller convention sitting underneath the first, and one large chain that follows it instead.
Petrol E10, as published .
Every ending, by grade
The last tenth of a penny on every price in the current file. Ten buckets per grade, and they sum to the number of forecourts publishing that grade — a forecourt that published no price for a grade is not in its count, and that is a silence rather than a zero.
Petrol E10 · 7,901 forecourts
Super E5 · 6,256 forecourts
Diesel B7 · 8,011 forecourts
Premium diesel · 4,174 forecourts
The file carries 2 further grades, in numbers too small to draw a distribution over: Diesel B10 — 61 of 63 end .9, HVO — 51 of 57 end .9. A percentage over 63 observations would look like the ones above and mean much less.
By brand
15 chains publish 50 or more Petrol E10 prices, which is the floor for saying anything about a pattern. Excludes 849 smaller retailers, 1,368 prices. 3 of the 15 price every forecourt to .9 without exception.
| Brand | Ends .9 | Ends .7 | Whole penny | Other | Forecourts |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Asda | 40% | 60% | — | — | 321 |
| Gulf | 80% | 17% | 1% | 4 | 276 |
| Jet | 92% | 7% | 1% | 1 | 301 |
| Texaco | 97% | 2% | — | 3 | 490 |
| Morrisons | 96% | 4% | — | — | 340 |
| EG On the Move | 91% | 9% | — | — | 147 |
| BP | 99% | 0% | 0% | 3 | 1,014 |
| Valero | 96% | 4% | — | — | 167 |
| Esso | 100% | 0% | 0% | 3 | 1,437 |
| Shell | 99% | 1% | 0% | — | 872 |
| Murco | 96% | 2% | 1% | 2 | 156 |
| Asda Express | 99% | 1% | — | — | 84 |
| Tesco | 100% | — | — | — | 516 |
| Sainsburys | 100% | — | — | — | 316 |
| Maxol | 100% | — | — | — | 91 |
Asda is the outlier and it is not close. 192 of its 321 forecourts published a petrol price ending .7 — 60% of the chain, against 4.3% of the market. We report what was published and nothing about why.
What this is measured over
The current file only —113 readings we have collected ourselves. Not the backfilled weeks: those prices reach us rounded to the whole penny, so counting endings across the archive would measure the source's resolution and report it as a change in the market.
How this is measured →