CarAdvice: Fuel Shopper Dockets Under Fire.

The ironic part of the system is that many motorists tend to spend more than they have to get the fuel-saving docket, and then travel past their local petrol station to fill up at a station which honours their docket. This usually results in more money being spent for a minuscule saving.

So true. We have covered fuel shopper dockets many times here at Oz Bargain Blog and at OzBargain.com.au. Every now and then you will get big mega retailers offering crazy deals that give you up to 20 cents a litre off, but usually with a catch written in tiny fonts attached to the footnotes. Personally I do not think the fuel dockets are on the way out though, as they are actually working as intended.

They were intended to build brand loyalty and bring more revenue to those mega retailers. In a greater or lesser degree, they have succeed with what they aimed to achieve, but not necessarily provide consumers any real saving at the end.

I for one do not bother to collect fuel dockets anymore. We do our grocery in Aldi these days, which is marginally cheaper than Coles and Woolies. I pump up my car mostly at BP because of the 5% cashback from the BP-Citibank Mastercard, although we usually have excessive Coles/Woolies fuel dockets from our non-driving friends. Most importantly, we just do not drive that much to warrant the effort to collect these dockets ourselves. 4 cents a litre only gives me maximum $2 saving for my old Nissan Pulsar (50 litre tank) — and that is every 3 weeks as that’s how frequent (or infrequent) we fill up the tank. $2 can be easily save by shopping at Aldi instead of Coles for 3 weeks…

Do you still collect fuel dockets? Do you think it is worth the effort?