Vocal Voices

Had to pop to Sainsbury's earlier today to get a few bits to make a pasta salad for a BBQ this evening.... The queue to get in was mad because people were trying to get in to buy petrol. So I decided to to to Morrisons, not much better but at least they have two lanes so one could get in. But all in all between leaving the house and getting back I passed five petrol stations, all with queues.

The media really really really need to take a long hard look at how how broadcast news - they are solely responsible for this panic buying!

Hear hear.
The Daily Mail is particularly blame worthy here. They are ALWAYS trying to start people off panic buying, it's so blatant!
Also the BBC and Sky, leading with this story. When they got down to the nitty gritty it turns out that BP have closed twenty Petrol stations - out of twelve hundred!
The media are out of control in this country.

So we shoot the messenger do we!?

Over the past days BP and Esso have reported station closures due to supply / driver problems. Then it was the Transport Secretary, Grant Shapps, who made the statement to the media this morning that people should not panic buy, thus putting it in the minds of some that they should.

The media didn't cause the problem, just reported what was being said by TPTB and also what people were doing.

We have 2 petrol stations in town. The central one is an Esso, and that has now totally run out of fuel. Might have been helpful if they'd put a sign up to that effect up, however .....

The other is a Shell (I think) on the Shaftesbury road - it was rammed this afternoon; there was a queue of about 20 cars (including an ambulance), right back to the roundabout.
A garage in Shaftesbury itself has been reported as imposing a £30 limit on purchases ......

Yes it's just madness, but you can understand the mentality, being in a more rural area - we haven't got much choice in the way of petrol stations around here, so it is rather a question of grab it when you see it. I've got 3/4 tank ATM but will probably stay local until things are more back to normal.

I wouldn't shoot the messenger as such, WM, but I'd certainly give him a good kicking!

It is almost the perfect storm of a story.

We have known about HGV driver shortages for ages. The knock-ons are also well known with closures of some Nandos', KFCs, McDs, Greggs and others. Then we had pub chains closing pubs due to shortage of beer etc. Ikea went short of furniture, Curry's PC World had trouble accessing electronics and Next short of clothes. None of those things were caused by the media, but they were widely reported. Should we not have been told?

The upshot of all that is that shortages, or the possibility of them, are in the public's minds and fuel just got added to the list.

The big difference is that fuel has become a necessity whereas another Peri-peri chicken or a Bangladeshi blouse don't quite fit the bill for panic buying: fuel does.

We had to go past Sainsbury’s petrol station to get to the M&S foodhall this evening, there were no queues but a couple of A boards on the approach saying that they’d only got unleaded.

Interestingly I had to get diesel today. When I say had to, I mean I was on empty or I wouldn't have bothered. There were queues at Morrisons, most people only seemed to be topping up.

miasmum wrote:Interestingly I had to get diesel today. When I say had to, I mean I was on empty or I wouldn't have bothered. There were queues at Morrisons, most people only seemed to be topping up.

That’s what my cousin said too. She was on red so had to get diesel and queued for 25 minutes to do so but said she noticed that people were just topping up a small amount.

Pictures in the media are showing queues at petrol stations despite the media reporting government spokespeople and the industry saying that there are no shortages.

Ordinary people are causing the panic, not the media. We are the problem, but it is easier to blame someone else.

John managed to get diesel last night after trying the six local stations. Five were completely closed whilst the sixth had diesel but no petrol.

Tom has a 45 minute drive to work, his school is quite rural and a lot of kids get school buses from Lichfield, Burton and Tamworth as it’s not well served by public transport. He’s got enough petrol to get to work and back until, hopefully, Wednesday. We worked out that to get public transport he’d need to take a bus from here to town, walk to the station on the other side of town, take the train into New St and then change to another to Burton. Once in Burton get a bus to the stop nearest to the school and then walk for just over 2 miles. All told it’d take him around 3 hours and due to the times that the buses start running it’d mean he’d not arrive at work until mid morning.

Obviously there’ll be a lot of people in a similar position who can’t work from home.