compensation for independent stations must be “serious, not for fun”, says Mobilians union

Compensation for independent stations must be “seriously, not to please”, declared Monday September 18 on franceinfo Francis Pousse, national president of the Fuel Distributors and New Energy branch of the Mobilians union, and owner of an Esso station in Arnage, in Sarthe. Compensation is planned for independent service stations, due to the loss-making sales that the government wants to authorize, and which the independents may not be able to match, particularly in the face of hypermarkets. A bill is to be debated in the Assembly in October.

franceinfo: What emerged from your meeting with Bruno Le Maire, Agnès Pannier-Runacher and Olivia Grégoire?

Francis Pousse: We have made an observation, namely that there is a real danger for the service stations that I represent, in particular those outside the Total network, which already operates at 1.99 euros per liter. The Minister of the Economy noted that we were going to work on a compensation fund. This would involve compensating for each liter not sold due to these potentially dangerous loss-making operations by supermarkets. We need to work to establish the amounts and budgets. We also obtained the reactivation of a fund to support the energy transition and economic transition, so that our stations will still be alive for several years to distribute fossil fuels, but also new fuels.

On what basis will this compensation be calculated?

I made it clear that serious compensation was needed. If we are satisfied with a few cents, it is not possible. Beyond the loss of fuel sales, you have all the ancillary activities which will be impacted by the lack of attendance at the stations. So I reminded myself that it didn’t have to be just to please us.

Isn’t it going backwards to jump better?

Certainly. We know very well that the rise in fuel prices is not going to stop. We also know very well that we must get away from all oil, of course. But there, the conditions are different. We are told that for six months large stores will be able to sell at a loss. The little ones won’t be able to keep up. So we are in a completely different field from our usual competition. If the supermarkets partially use this system, we will widen the price differences between our stations and those. Inevitably, we will have very significant volume breakouts.