Quote:
Originally Posted by Flames in 07
Considering those oil companies owe you absolutely nothing I don't think its that bad.
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Nah I work in oil and gas and agree with him quite strongly. This is actually quite a lousy promotion.
Shell is a >$230 Billion company. It operates in 70 countries.
Let's assume that each station has 4 pumps and each car takes 5 mins to fill. That's 48 cars an hour. Let's assume all cars are filling up 100L (and I'm being generous here because we all know that isn't true). That's 4,800L.
The savings are from $1.219/L to $0.399/L or so. So ~$0.82c/L. So each station is giving out about $3,936 in savings per hour. I don't know how many stations did the promotion but I'll wager to guess something like 20. So a grand spanking total of $78,720.
Shell makes 78 grand in about half of a second. Furthermore, thanks to the one hour only cheapskatedness of the program, everyone feels like they need to rush the fata around firing into gas stations causing ridiculously unnecessary traffic jams that, if the promotion lasted a day or two- people could maybe try and plan around.
Sometimes a promotion isn't really a promotion and calling them cheap is appropriate. In this case I think it's fair. ExxonMobil once was proud about $1MM donation to malaria research in Africa. This was a few years ago. It was a pretty shameless pat on the back on their website, when the reality is that the profit they garnered from the country was so unbelievably extremely high that that $1,000,000 really didn't pale into anything in comparison.
There is nothing wrong with expecting more from the world's largest companies and deepest pockets in the communities that they actively rape and pillage, in spite of what the capitalism white knights will have you believe.
Would it have killed Shell to leave it on for an afternoon or *gasp* give it away for free? No.
Hell I couldn't tell you how much or many times this month they've pissed away that kind of money on the smallest, stupidest, most trivial ridiculous things because that's what oil companies do. Ever seen a supp AFE before? Companies go out and buy surveys and lease sites they'll sometimes never use, each of those is usually around $50,000.
So no, giving the community you have profited from for over 50 years some DISCOUNTED gas and setting the clock at 60 minutes is, actually, pretty poor in my eyes. Probably would have been better off doing nothing. It'd be like me going up to a homeless guy and being like hey, here's 1 cent.
