A history of UK petrol retailing: Oligarchy versus dynamism

Abstract

The development of the retail petroleum industry in the UK has received only sporadic attention by academics. Yet the major oil companies are vertically integrated and so this industry is usually thought of as an oligarchy. However there have been significant exchanges of retailing sites as between the majors themselves, and the rise of competitors. These constitute both the multiple retailers, the supermarket chains, and , at the ‘competitive fringe’, there is a ‘tail’ of smaller independents. In this paper we identify the changes and analyse the factors underlying them.