TL;DR: The belief that “when prices spike, everything’s expensive, so there’s no point shopping around” is false — and the feed says the opposite. Mid-surge today, the Brisbane-metro ULP median is 224.9 c/L, but the cheapest board in town is 201.5 — a 23.4 c/L gap, about $13 on a 55-litre tank. A week ago, before the surge really ran, the median was 207.9 and the cheapest 191.5 — a gap of 16.4 c/L, about $9. So as the median surged roughly 17 cents, the gap to the cheapest servo didn’t shrink — it GREW, from 16.4 to 23.4 c/L, up 7 cents. The spike didn’t flatten the market. It stretched it. A price surge is the single best time to be picky about the pump.
Every time prices run, I get the same shrug: “everything’s expensive right now, what’s the point looking.” It sounds like common sense — if the whole market’s up, surely there’s nowhere cheap left. It’s the reasonable-sounding kind of belief I most like taking to the feed, because reasonable and true aren’t the same thing. Here’s the number.
The claim
The defeatism goes like this: a spike lifts every servo together, so the cheap ones and the dear ones all end up high, the differences wash out, and shopping around stops being worth the bother. Fill wherever, they’re all robbing you equally.
Two things are being claimed. One is that a surge compresses the market — pushes everyone up to roughly the same high number. The other follows from it: that the saving from finding the cheapest servo shrinks when prices are high. I can test both from the feed directly, by measuring the gap between the median and the cheapest board at two dates — one before the surge, one mid-surge.
What we checked
Everything below is the Queensland Government price feed — the price each servo reported charging, not a driver’s guess at the bowser. There are no user submissions in any of it.
I took the Brisbane-metro ULP boards at two snapshots. The first is 8 September, before this surge had really run. The second is today, 16 September, mid-surge. At each date I read off the metro median — the middle-of-the-pack price — and the single cheapest board in town, and measured the gap between them. If the defeatism is right, that gap should be smaller today than it was a week ago: prices up, differences washed out. If it’s wrong, the gap holds or widens.
What the feed shows
It widens.
- 8 Sep (before the surge ran): median 207.9, cheapest 191.5 — a gap of 16.4 c/L.
- 16 Sep (mid-surge): median 224.9, cheapest 201.5 — a gap of 23.4 c/L.
So the median surged about 17 cents in the week — and the gap to the cheapest servo grew by 7 cents, from 16.4 to 23.4. That’s the exact opposite of “the differences wash out.” On a 55-litre tank, today’s 23.4-cent gap is worth about $13; a week ago the 16.4-cent gap was worth about $9. The surge didn’t flatten the market into one expensive number. It stretched it wider than it was before.
And “wider” undersells it. Today the full metro spread — cheapest board to dearest — runs 201.5 to 236.9, about 35 cents between the cheapest and dearest servo in town. Pick wrong mid-surge and you’re paying a third of a dollar a litre more than the driver who looked.
Why the gap widens when prices spike
Here’s the mechanism, and it’s the same one that makes the up-move look like a conspiracy — but it isn’t. When a surge runs, the majors lead a restoration and the pack follows fast: the top of the market re-prices to the peak band in a day or two. I measured that up-move last week — 325 of 500 Brisbane stations changed price on a single Monday, most of them straight to the peak band. That’s the dear end of the market snapping up almost overnight.
But the discounters lag. They follow the hike up slowly — being the last to raise your price doesn’t lose you money the way being last to cut does, so the cheap end drifts up over days, not hours. Which means mid-surge you’re looking at a market where the top has already jumped and the bottom is still catching up. The pack has run ahead; the cheap servos are a few days behind it.
You can see the lag in one number. Today’s cheapest servo is 201.5 — which is below where the metro median sat a week ago (207.9). The cheap end is running about a week behind the pack, still selling near last week’s middle price while the median has moved 17 cents past it. That lag is the widened gap. It’s not that the discounters are being generous; it’s that they haven’t finished restoring yet, and the window before they do is exactly when the gap to them is at its widest.
The verdict
FALSE. “When prices spike there’s no point shopping around” has it backwards. A surge doesn’t compress the market — it stretches it, because the dear end hikes fast and the cheap end lags. Mid-surge today the gap to the cheapest servo is 23.4 c/L, wider than the 16.4 it was before the surge ran, and worth about $13 a tank versus $9. The spike is the single best time to be picky about the pump, not the worst.
So what for you
The practical read is a timing edge: shop hardest when prices are running, not when they’re flat. A surge week is when the gap to the cheapest servo is at its widest, so a little effort finding the laggard pays the most it ever will — about $13 a tank today. The catch is that it’s temporary in the best possible way: the cheap end will catch up over the next few days, the discounters will finish restoring, and the gap will close back toward its usual width. Which is precisely why you look now, mid-surge, while the cheap servos are still behind the pack — not next week, when they’ve caught up. And the same maths that makes a big gap worth chasing still holds: a 23-cent saving pays for a genuinely long detour, about a 60 km round trip on fuel alone, so a wide-gap surge week is exactly when the drive to the cheap servo is worth it. The everyday spread within 4 km of you is real on a normal day — a surge just stretches it wider. Pinly Fuel shows you every servo’s price around you off the QLD Government feed, so when the market’s running you can spot the servo that hasn’t caught up yet — before you pull in, not after.
How we measure: Brisbane-metro ULP from the QLD Government feed at two snapshots — 8 September (median 207.9, cheapest 191.5, gap 16.4) and 16 September (median 224.9, cheapest 201.5, gap 23.4; full spread 201.5 to 236.9). The honest limits: this is one metro, one fuel (ULP/91), and two snapshots, not a continuous run — a different city or a diesel map could soften or sharpen the picture. “Cheapest” is a single servo, not a whole cheap tier, so it’s the best case, not a floor you’ll always find. And the extra-wide gap is temporary by nature — it exists because the cheap end lags the hike, and it closes as they catch up. But temporary in your favour: mid-surge is the widest the gap gets, which is why it’s the best week to look, not skip.
— Priya