Rick's b.log - entry 2026/03/05

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The Petrol Pump Paradox

Anyway, the plot line is stupidly simple. It's early Spring, the grass is going to go "boing!" and be twice as tall from one day to the next, mower action needed. Quite a bit this time of year. So I put my 10 litre bright red plastic jerrican into the boot of my electric car and I go to work. I'll pick up some petrol on the way home.

Now, this wouldn't be a blog article if I said I put my bank card into the machine, tapped in my PIN, put the nozzle into the can, and squirted in ten litres of the go-bang juice, would it?

It would, however, be a blog article if it looked like a dress rehearsal for a disaster movie. Pumps sectioned off with tape, an employee on the verge of tears trying to calmly explain that there's nothing left while being shouted at, blaming her, blaming the government, everybody lies... People are giving her the arm of honour, and more aimed in the direction of what I would assume is Paris.
I half expected a military helicopter to pass overhead and flares alongside the road.

I went home, had a cup of tea. And noted that I didn't pass one single nutter standing on a roundabout with a yellow hazard jacket the entire way.

It was the day of my kiné, so after half an hour I set out again. This time I went by the way of the tiny superette where everything costs twice as much as a regular supermarket. They had a big sign up saying they were out of SP95-E10 (that's the three star with ethanol one). They did have SP95 (three star, no ethanol) and diesel. This place doesn't sell SP98 (four star) as, well, it's a dinky rural town and probably one of the last places in France where you can still see a 2CV on the road.

So I joined the queue of people who were anxiously checking their dashboards as though the fuel gauge might have developed a sense of humour or, worse, be like that movie cliché where it drops immediately to 'E' when tapped. Then I pulled out, drove past everybody, and went to the free pump on the other side. Why? Well, they all had their fuel caps on the right so went to the pump on the left.
The pump on the right was completely empty.
Does nobody realise you can just tug on the fuel pipe to get a bit more to reach around to the other side of the car?

Why was there fuel here? Well, I won't shock you with the price I paid, but let's just say that about as many people came in and drove away as joined the queue. They probably looked at the sign with the prices and were "I really desperately need petrol.....but not that much.".

In the kiné, I relayed the state of affairs to my trainer. She told me that the guy in the other room had said that the petrol station that I had just been to was now closed.
Reader, this was complete bollocks because I went back to the same supermarket afterwards to get a box of Golden Grahams. The allegedly-closed petrol station was open, was still selling the two types of fuel it had, and the supermarket owner was probably wetting themselves with excitement having sold more in an afternoon than all of February... people are paying our markup, ohhhh myyyyy!

Now, I want to highlight something very clearly. As I walked into the supermarket, there was one of those free-standing noticeboards that gives the headline from the paper. It said "Do not panic, there is no shortage of petrol!".

Of course, the French being French and utterly trusting anything their government says all rushed out to stock up on petrol. It was a mess. It was chaos. It was a weekday afternoon in early Spring.

I find this whole thing to be quite fascinating, actually, because the only reason the petrol station had run out of petrol was the number of people panic-buying petrol.

This creates what I like to think of as the petrol pump paradox, that is to say the behaviour triggered by the fear of a shortage is precisely what causes the shortage that then appears to justify the fear. In other words, you just need to mumble the words "penurie d'essence" (petrol shortage) and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Now, the thing is, the supermarkets are not holding back for "important" clients. Macron isn't a liar and full of crap (at least, not in relation to this). The government isn't trying to interfere with your lives by creating artificial shortages. And while the unfolding catastrophe in the Middle East is what precipitated all of this, it isn't a cause. It will absolutely have an effect, but not like that.

The secret, and the explanation, is something known as "Just In Time", or JIT. Yes, I know, that's a compiler technique. It is also a stock control system.
A petrol station doesn't contain a vast underground ocean of bang-juice in multiple exciting flavours (and whatever the hell "AdBlue" is supposed to be). It doesn't have a direct pipeline to the refinery. It stores, quite simply, about what it expects to sell between deliveries.
In ordinary circumstances this works beautifully, because by and large people behave in a fairly regular way. It's largely the same clientele at that supermarket who may not always buy petrol at the same time each week, but as creatures of habit we do often work to a fairly predictable schedule. Throw in some extra thought to cater for holiday weekends, the big summer migration, the weekend of cut-price petrol, and, well, everything just works. People buy petrol in small doses when they feel they need it, the tanks run down gradually, and because this is a well tuned system, nobody notices. This, paradoxically, is exactly how we know the system is working perfectly. You don't know anything about the petrol pumps other than "you drive up, get petrol, leave".
The entire underlying infrastructure is invisible. You don't wake up thinking about the logistical dance involved in getting everything in the right place at the right time so when you turn up, stuff squirts out of the nozzle on demand. But there's so much more to all of this. There is electricity in your socket. There are bread and croissants in the morning. Linguine made in Italy (like it should be) is sitting there on the shelf waiting for you to pick it up and give it the love it deserves by cooking it correctly and eating it with a smile on your face as you watch kittens chase dots of light on YouTube videos. All this stuff works, and because it works, nobody pays any attention to it other than maybe complaining about the price.

Introduce one small rumour, perhaps the fact that if a bunch of hoodlums messing with a single pipe in Nigeria is enough to add thirty centimes to the price of petrol, what do you think bombs raining down on the petrol-producing Arab nations will do? One doesn't even need to mention the possibility of future shortages before the panic sets in, and suddenly the system is asked to perform something it was never designed to do.
Instead of supplying a normal amount to a steady stream of people, it must suddenly supply a lot to everyone at once.
People who would normally buy petrol next Tuesday decide to buy it today "just to be safe". People who still have half a tank decide they might as well fill up anyway "because I don't know what will be happening next week". People who had absolutely no intention of buying petrol at all suddenly find themselves joining the queue because, well, everyone else is doing it and it would be silly not to, especially if there's a problem and it runs out.

Which then produces the most persuasive piece of evidence imaginable: an empty petrol pump.
At this point the original rumour begins to look less like speculation and more like confirmation. After all, if there wasn't a shortage, why would the petrol station be empty?

The answer, as it happens, is exactly because of the people currently asking that question.

The nerdy name for this is an information cascade. This is what happens when people begin making decisions not based upon their own knowledge of a situation, but by observing the behaviour of the people around them. If one driver pulls into a petrol station and fills up because they heard a rumour, that is just one person acting cautiously. But if the next ten drivers see the queue forming and assume those people must know something that they do not, they join in as well. The queue grows longer, the rumour gains credibility, and before long the original uncertainty has transformed itself into a kind of truth. Nobody knows if there is or will be a shortage, but everyone can see the queue, and the queue becomes the evidence.

We saw exactly the same phenomenon during Covid, when vast numbers of people collectively decided that the appropriate response to a respiratory virus was to purchase industrial quantities of toilet paper. Supermarkets do not normally store mountains of the stuff, because people usually buy it at a predictable rate that roughly corresponds to the speed at which human beings digest food. Toilet paper is rather specialised in its purpose. It isn't exactly a versatile household material. You can't use it in the kitchen to mop up spills because in order to be easy on the sewerage system it rapidly disintegrates into mush when wet. So, really, consumption is pretty well tied to how fast your tea and curry passes through.
But as soon as photographs of empty shelves began circulating, people who had previously been perfectly content with their existing supply suddenly became convinced that they needed to stock up immediately, and not just a 12 roll pack, enough that they can go an entire year. Maybe longer.

You see where this is going, right? The shortage, that would have initially been little more than a logistical hiccup caused by the unexpected demand turned into a self-sustaining feedback loop powered entirely by human psychology.

This isn't some weird contemporary internet-fuelled weirdness. There were numerous shortages in the 1970s: the oil crisis of 1973 led to shortages of sugar in 1973, bread in 1974, salt in 1975, bread again in 1977... Shortages pushed up prices, these price rises led to demands for better pay, which in turn led to strikes (hmm, does any of this sound familiar? ☺). In response the sugar and bread was rationed. Even such staples of life as tea, sugar, eggs, flour, and indeed toilet paper can succumb because panic buying is only one alarming headline away.
Also, did you notice that the trigger was an oil crisis? Not unlike what one might expect to happen if somebody goes and lobs bombs at the Middle East? What was that quote about people who don't learn from history...? Hmmm...

Britain even managed a financial version of this in 2007, when depositors queued and queued and queued to withdraw their savings from Northern Rock, which had the effect of creating the very liquidity crisis that they feared.

What I also found interesting were the people that believed that Macron was lying. The French are no strangers to distrusting their government, but some of the discussions I had at work today, you'd think their hapless President went and flicked the off switch all by himself.

The reason these situations so often drift toward conspiracy theories is that the mundane explanation is often deeply psychologically unsatisfying.

"A complex logistical system temporarily failed because millions of people slightly changed their purchasing behaviour at the same time" is technically correct but it just isn't an exciting story. There is no villain and no ulterior motive, it's simply a complex system doing what complex systems do when the regularity that they depend upon is upended.

A conspiracy, however, offers narrative emotional comfort. There's intention, often some sort of "hidden knowledge", and the great reassurance that somebody somewhere is in control of this (so there's somebody to blame).

Actually, that "so there's somebody to blame" should probably be in italicised bold, because that's what we all want isn't it? A boogeyman. Somebody to say "it's your fault". Conspiracies feed into this, because it absolves us from the need to look in the mirror to find the real boogeyman, the real reason everything fell over in a messy heap.

There is a deep irony, not just in the juxtaposition between the newspaper headline and the reality playing out on the other side of the car park, but also that these very systems that people get so stressed about and accuse of failure are, in point of fact, functioning extraordinarily well most of the time. Indeed, I would be tempted to say "functioning extraordinarily" most of the time.
Think about it. You go into the supermarket on a Friday morning and pick up a box of fresh croissants.
Well, the flour. The drinkable water. The electricity. The machinery. The people. And everything else you want into the supermarket from, from teabags to pens, they're all there waiting for you. Once in a while there's a glitch and a little apology sign, but missing a delivery of cream doesn't mean the system has failed because there are hundreds if not thousands of systems interacting.
But it doesn't stop there. Your passage through the checkout is (or should normally be) painless and hassle free. Beep! Beep! Beep! Beep! the totals arrive, loyalty bonuses deducted, and then you "pay" by waving a silly little plastic rectangle in the air. Or maybe feeding it into the front of a machine if you're not quite so trusting. A good checkout girl can pass items faster than you could hope to bag them. The payment process is just as quick. And quite a few supermarkets have brought in self-scan systems where - if the master computer trusts you - your entire "buying" part is handing over the scanner and then paying. I did this last Saturday at the Leclerc. My scanner was checked, no re-reads, go to the information desk. I did. I paid. The whole process took about a minute.
Now spend a minute thinking about everything going on behind the scenes to make this work. To make modern life work.
There's no drama. Petrol is in the pump, pizza is in the cool cabinet, chips are in the freezer. And tea, in various flavours each promising this is "The country's favourite" are sitting side by side on the shelf. All of this stuff "just happens" and usually it happens so reliably day after day, month after month, that we just don't notice or even really understand the incredible logistics in making it "just happen".

But, the moment the system is stressed and things get derailed, this invisibility vanishes. Suddenly everybody notices, often without understanding what was happening in the first place.
This leads to the wonderfully circular conclusion that the empty petrol pump proves something suspicious must be happening, when in reality it simply proves that everyone turned up at the petrol station at the same time.

And then, standing beside the empty pump we helped create, we will nod knowingly and say, "See? I knew there was a shortage".

Meanwhile somebody, somewhere, who just wanted ten litres of petrol for a mower is wondering what the hell just happened.

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