So the gas pumps in the province are prone to error in favour of retailers, as CBC reports.
Well, sort of.
We don’t know how many gas pumps there are in the province but CBC reports that of the 962 examined over a two year period, nine percent didn’t pump accurately.
Of the nine percent, 56% erred in favour of the retailer. Logically, the remaining 44% didn’t pump the right amount but the consumer benefited.
But do the math on that to understand if you had a “decent chance” of not getting the right gas amount as the CBC story asserts.
Fifty-six percent of nine percent of 962 works out to be 48.
48 out of 962.
That works out to be 4.9%.
So at any time you are buying gas, about five percent of the pumps across the province could be reading incorrectly in favour of the retailer.
Four percent of the pumps will make mistakes in your favour.
Gasoline watchdog George Murphy thinks that federal government officials should inspect every gas pump in the province twice a year in order to stop this. Taxpayers would bear the full freight for that, most likely.
Seems like a bit of overkill given the number of errors is relative small.
If you want to stop gouging consumers, it would be far easier and far less costly to consumers if we simply got rid of the gas price fixing scheme the provincial government runs. People like George Murphy agitated for that in order to protect consumers.
As it turned out, the government price fixing scheme gouges the people pumping gas into their cars 100% of the time. The only people who benefit from it are gasoline retailers and the provincial government and they benefit from the price fixing scheme 100% of the time.
Five percent chance you could lose some money versus 100% chance of getting hosed.
There’s gouging and then there’s gouging, obviously.
That’s math anyone can follow.
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