AFAIK*, my local tesco is still 90.9p a litre - the cheapest available in about 20 miles - with the BP facing it wanting 94.9, both for vanilla 95RON. Time to make another quick trip to Machine Mart, this time to pick up one or two of their five-gallon WW2 style jerry cans, me thinks.
There's been crazymad queues bursting out of the site, which has caused total barmy chaos as the holdup at the petrol station (typically it's full of dicks who don't know which end of the pump to hold anyway, or to take the furthest forward pump if two are available on the same aisle... just the area i live in) led to complete gridlock around the entire retail complex - that has a MASSIVE tesco (i sh*t you not, it has two floors!), M&S foodhall, Boots, gym, dixons, next, etc etc. No one being able to get in or out of the shops because of all entrances and exits, plus a fair bit of the main road being chocka. In the end some bright spark in the shop figured out a way to use the goods entrance, staff car park, and a usually locked-up emergency gateway as a bypass and holding pattern to ease things a bit, but not by much.
Truly mental, as i bet if i was to go up there at 11.30 it'd be near deserted**. And there REALLY can't be that many locals needing to put petrol in all between 4.30 and 7.30pm... that's just the headless chicken "oh oh petrol might go up in price tomorrow, MUST GO GET SOME RIGHT OUT OF WORK" approach. The society we live in, unfortunately... never mind that the papers and radio all day have been non stop "panic buying at weekend pointless" (similar scenes on saturday**, but not as drastic) and "protesters promise to not blockade supplies", there's a sniff of a price rise or a protest and its like the worlds gonna collapse. Jeez people.... if your cars empty tomorrow morning and there's temporarily nothing at the station.... call in sick!
it was kinda like this... road on the left = a453 (jammed up enough at that time already, this really didnt help), main supermarket and it's main car park off the bottom right of the picture, with an exit-only route onto the a452, black arrows show one-ways, red ones the route that was opened. all the little coloured blobs are cars... what a mess. A literal bit of gridlocking, as people couldnt even properly leave the petrol station, meaning no more could enter it, and the whole thing fed back into itself. Crap design in the first place, of course.
(thanks to whoever posted the map, allowing this bit of one-hour-electromeditiation finger painting some legitimacy
for "clarity" i've omitted those driving out of the one-way entrance into the strip mall part of the site, and straight across the traffic and pavement central reservation to escape it all...)
* this means, "here's another term for you to look up"
** was similarly rubbish on saturday, but at 3.30am sunday morning, following a night shift, there were "only" two other people there, also with plastic one-litre jerrycans like i was.
