Just had our monthly CEO/Managers meeting at my place of employment yesterday & some interesting things came up that I thought my fellow members might be interested in.
As some of you who have read & managed to stay awake through my ramblings might know, I work for a company in Cent. WI that owns & operates several C-stores, 22 in fact. We just recently unbranded 20 of them, all Citgo & a few Mobil's. The CEO's had had enough of Chavez & his big mouth & felt Citgo was a damaged brand. No sense losing business because some fool thinks he can use his oil money to buy off the world.
Anyways, during the discussion about what was happening in the gasoline biz the discussion came up about whether or not we should start selling Top Tier gas. I, of course, chimed in about my fellow Forum members expressing some interest in the Top Tier marketing & asked, again, just what was the difference between non-Top Tier gas & the former. Essentially, from the bosses mouth, Top Tier requires one more squirt of detergent in the mix, that's it folks. That's the difference. Once applied, any dealer can now market their gasoline using Top Tier as a selling point. It is not specific to brand (because it's all the same) but to whether or not the gasoline distributor applies the 'squirt'.
So we'll be marketing Top Tier gas.
In addition, I also discovered 2 other things: one, that all of our gas (except Premium) is now being mixed w/ Ethanol. Used to be mixed only when the price of Ethanol was cheaper than the gasoline. Recently, the price of Ethanol is cheap enough where it makes sense to mix it with everything. Two, many stations (including name brands) are now purchasing below grade octane gas & mixing it with enough Ethanol to boost the octane. This includes premium! Of course, there's no way of knowing just what station you pull into is doing this, I would doubt they are advertising this sneaky ploy.
Funny how integrity sometimes falls apart when there is money to be made!