[Crashandburn]

posted verbatim as I recieved it. It may be a scam, but its not actually a bad idea. It can be copied and pasted into an e-mail message if you wish to send it on.

"We are going to hit close to 89p a litre by the summer, it may be even higher. Would you rather petrol prices came down instead? We need to take some intelligent, united action. Philip Hollsworth, offered this good idea:

This makes MUCH MORE SENSE than the "don't buy petrol on a certain day" campaign that was going around last April /May! The oil companies just laughed at that because they knew we wouldn?t continue to "hurt ourselves" by refusing to buy petrol. It was more inconvenient to us than it was a problem for them. BUT, whoever thought of this idea, has come up with a plan that can really work.

Please read it and join in! Now that the oil company cartels and the OPEC nations have conditioned us to think that the cost of a litre is CHEAP at 77p-80p, we need to take aggressive action to teach them that BUYERS control the market, not sellers. With the price of petrol going up more each day, we consumers need to take action. The only way we are going to see the price of petrol come down is if we hit someone in the pocket by not purchasing their Petrol! And we can do that WITHOUT hurting ourselves. Here's the idea:

For the rest of this year (or until the desired effect is achieved), DON'T purchase ANY petrol from the two biggest oil companies (which now are one), ESSO and BP. If they are not selling any petrol, they will quickly reduce their prices. If they reduce their prices, the other companies will have to follow suit.

But to have an impact, we need to reach literally MILLIONS of Esso and BP petrol buyers. It's really simple to do!! Now, don't wimp out at this point...keep reading and I'll explain how simple it is to reach millions of people!! I am sending this note to a lot of people. If each of you send it to at least ten more, then 30 x 10 = 300... and those 300 send it to at least ten more (300 x 10 = 3,000) ... and so on, by the time the message reaches only the sixth generation of people, we will have reached over THREE MILLION consumers! If those three million get excited and
pass this on to ten friends each, then 30 million people will have been contacted! If it goes one level further, yes - you're right... . THREE HUNDRED MILLION PEOPLE!!!

Again, all you have to do is send this to a minimum of 10 people. Thats all.(And NOT buy your petrol at ESSO/BP).

How long will all this take? - If everyone sends this email out to ten more people within one day of receipt, all 300 MILLION people could conceivably be contacted within the next 8 days!!! I?ll bet you didn't think you and I had that much potential, did you! Acting together we CAN DEFINITELY make a difference. If this makes sense to you please, please pass this message on NOW. PLEASE HOLD OUT UNTIL THEIR PRICES GO BELOW 70p A LITRE. (They would still make a healthy profit at these prices). It's easy to make this happen. Just forward this email,and buy your petrol at Shell, Tesco, Sainsburys, Jet etc.- i.e. boycott BP and Esso

Kind Regards

James Savage
Components OEM Co-ordinator
Tel: +044 1753 789674
Fax: +44 1753789880"

edited to add : apologies if this has been posted before

[Bonjour]

Don't BP actually supply a lot of the other garages (e.g. Tesco) as well?

[Paul]

I got this a few times via email last year.

[Crashandburn]

I'm not surprised Paul. It may well be the same e-mail doing the rounds again (or it might just have taken a long time to reach me!).

and yes Bonjour, that is the flaw in the plan. There is no way of telling who supplies the supermarkets.

[suvssuk]

This is considered an urban legend... and an old one at that.

http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/outrage/nogas.htm

In a nutshell, the plan just doesn't work.

-suvssuk

[Rich-UK]

As long as we're not boycotting Optimax

[Crashandburn]

thanks for the link suvssuk.

[X Wing]

suvssuk beat mto it.

Snopes is a great site for checking out all these type of e-mails, as well as some purported "viruses".

[Shamster]

Quote:

Originally posted by Rich-UK
As long as we're not boycotting Optimax

My sentiments precisely!