News.Scotland.Org

November, 19
Petrol stations one of the new victims of the severe competition in UK, has left no other option for these filling station resulting to their closure. It is known that every day at least one petrol pump shuts down with the increase in prices and less profits share. There are several factors responsible for this downfall, with supermarkets and other small filling station making the competition more tight, its very hard for these petrol station to resist such a fight.
Not bothered by the decline in petrol stations in Scotland, the demand for petrol continues to rise. Figures suggest that in present context the number of petrol station left in UK is the lowest number since 1920. All these facts points out the poor state of petrol stations in UK.
This problem has now taken a huge shape making the authorities to workout plan to contour this serious issue. Action is needed to stop the downfall of many such petrol pumps in coming years. Looking to the graphs it is known that about 30 percent filling stations has shut down in past thirty years.
Highland Council has now began new research to identify what action can be taken to halt the decline and what can be done to help vulnerable businesses in order to maintain a viable network of pumps in rural areas. Not only the rural petrol stations have been the victims of this competition but even the urban filling stations are forced to close down. Ray Hollywood of the Petrol Retailers Association said “In recent years in Scotland it has been the urban areas that have lost the forecourts. An underlying problem is the supermarkets, but the closures have also much to do with the major oil companies coming out of ownership. They can’t get the volumes to warrant development and are selling on those pieces of real estate.”

It is also seen that nowadays people prefer to head towards local supermarkets to fill petrol, killing the business of the filling stations. People are looking for local convenience these days, this change in physiology of people have made the survival of petrol station very hard. If this trend continues in future then people living in rural sections or highlands have to face severe problem to get petrol. Now the government needs to chalk out some strategy to handle this problem or else it would change in to drastic problem for Scotland.

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