10/04/2026
I used to picture gas station owners the way you probably do. Leaning back somewhere, getting fanned by an oversized banana leaf while being hand-fed grapes, watching the numbers tick up on the pump, quietly celebrating every global crisis. Comfortable. Insulated. Maybe even grateful for the chaos.
Then I met one at MIAS 2026. He owns a station in Davao. He came up for something totally different. We weren’t even talking about fuel prices; just two people in a conversation about the cars on display that wandered somewhere honest. And what he said stopped me cold. “The hardest part about the fuel crisis is that people think we benefit from this. We don’t. Our margin is fixed in pesos, not percentages. When prices go up, we actually get squeezed harder.”
I didn’t believe him at first. Until I did the math. And yes, not only do they suffer the same way we all do, they get it twice as bad because they get the hate and blame for it too. It’s like being slapped on both sides of the face.
Because here’s what I learned after digging in a little deeper. Gas stations don’t earn a cut of the pump price. They earn a flat peso amount per liter, roughly two to three pesos, whether fuel costs sixty or a hundred and twenty. At ₱60 a liter, that’s a 5% margin. At today’s prices, it’s barely 3%.
And that’s before the banks take their cut. Credit card merchant fees are a percentage of the total transaction, which means every time pump prices climb, the bank automatically collects more on every fill-up. The dealer’s margin stays flat. The bank’s doesn’t.
Now before you say it, I know what you’re thinking. “But they bought that fuel cheaper. They’re selling old stock at the new price.” It’s the most common objection, and it sounds airtight. Except that’s not how it works. At least not for the gas stations. Philippine dealers price on replacement cost, meaning what the next tanker will cost them, not what the last one did. That’s the industry standard, enforced by the oil companies themselves through wholesale pricing, which in turn is pegged to the MOPS, the Mean of Platts Singapore, a global benchmark that no local station owner has any influence over. Whatever brief inventory gain exists on the old stock flows upstream, absorbed into the new wholesale price they have to pay for the next delivery. They don’t pocket the spread. It is not within their control.
And that next delivery has to be paid upfront. In full. At the new higher price. Before a single liter crosses the pump. While that margin stays flat, everything else climbs. Electricity, salaries, rent, all moving in one direction. Volume drops because every spike pushes drivers to carpool, downgrade, or simply stay home. The dealers of this world are personally financing the price hike with their own capital, on a margin that was already thin before any of this started.
Then on top of that, the monitoring teams arrive. Show-cause orders get issued for “premature” adjustments. The public once again points at the guy behind the counter.
But the real money is elsewhere. And the biggest beneficiary isn’t even an oil company.
It’s VAT. Twelve percent, applied to the full pump price, every single time. And this doesn’t even include the fixed excise taxes layered in under the TRAIN Law. Look at who’s actually winning every time the price climbs:
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At ₱50/liter vs ₱90/liter
Dealer Margin: ₱3.00 → ₱3.00 (never moves)
Government VAT: ₱6.00 → ₱10.80 (and climbing)
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No tanker to finance. No staff to pay. No customer to lose. Just a larger collection on the same transaction, baked into the price before a single pump turns on.
Most stations only survive because of the convenience store. The car wash. The coffee. The fuel itself is almost a loss leader designed to get your car to stop.
The guy from Davao wasn’t asking for sympathy. He was just telling the truth. And once you hear it, you can’t unhear it.
Because if people like him aren’t the villain, who is?
The oil companies may have some responsibility here, but they also carry real exposure. Inventory risk, logistics, infrastructure. Station owners carry all of that too, but on a margin that hasn’t budged in years, on capital committed long before any of this started.
The one entity that benefits from every single price hike, absorbs zero of the pain, and dodges the headline?
That’s the one worth talking about.
RA 12316 already gives the President the power to suspend or slash excise taxes when crude hits the threshold. He also has emergency powers. Yet here we are. Still waiting for some relief. A VAT suspension is actively on the table; even the oil companies are pushing for it. So why are we still paying both?
Because the government’s cut grows with every peso the price climbs. No tanker to finance. No volume drop to absorb. No customer to lose. Just an expanding share of your pain, collected quietly, every time you fill up.
We had the wrong guy leaning back getting fanned all along.
Demand the suspension. Demand the review of TRAIN excise. No more excuses. The numbers don’t lie. Neither should we.
