I filled up the car this morning. £1.50.9 a litre.
The forecourt resembled a doctor’s waiting room. Grim faces everywhere, everyone staring at the pump display with the expression you’d expect from a man watching a taxi meter in gridlocked traffic.
A bloke in a high-vis sat in the passenger seat of the van at the next pump, sipping from a Starbucks cup. His colleague stood at the nozzle, shaking his head as the numbers ticked past fifty quid. He slotted it back and walked inside to pay, muttering something I didn’t catch but completely understood.
I drove home thinking about that Starbucks.
Not the coffee. The maths.
A Grande latte goes for £4.20. Sounds reasonable enough for a hot drink in a cardboard cup. But the cup holds 473ml. Do the maths and you land on £8.88 a litre. Six times the price of petrol. The bloke in the van sat there sipping something six times more expensive than the fuel his mate just pumped into the tank, and neither of them flinched.
So I spent the afternoon doing what any reasonable person does on a Tuesday: working out the per-litre cost of everyday liquids to see where petrol actually sits in the pecking order.
If the price of unleaded keeps you awake at night, the rest of this might help. Equally, it might not.
That bottle of olive oil on your kitchen counter. The one you reach for without checking the price because it still feels like a staple rather than a luxury. A litre of decent extra virgin runs to about £12 right now. Eight times petrol. We pour it into a pan, let it smoke because the heat’s too high, tip it down the sink, and start again without blinking. Try that with eight quid’s worth of unleaded at a BP forecourt and see how far you get.
Every parent in Britain keeps a bottle of Calpol in the medicine cabinet. It emerges at 2am when a small, furious human with a temperature refuses to sleep and the rest of the household teeters on the brink of mutiny. A 100ml bottle runs to £3.29 at the chemist. That’s £32.90 a litre. Twenty-two times petrol. You stand there in your pants, half-asleep, squirting strawberry-flavoured paracetamol into a tiny syringe and silently praying it works, knowing full well that per litre, you’re administering something worth more than a decent bottle of champagne to a toddler who can’t even say thank you.
A standard 10ml bottle of vape liquid costs £2.99. That’s £299 a litre. Nearly two hundred times petrol. And come October, the government plans to slap a new excise duty on it — 22p per ml, plus VAT — which will roughly double the cost of the cheaper brands. At that point, filling your car with unleaded starts to feel like a genuine bargain compared to filling your lungs with watermelon-flavoured toxins.
Pick up a 100ml bottle of Dior Sauvage from a department store and you’ll hand over about £100. That’s £1,000 a litre. Six hundred and sixty times petrol. Two careful sprays before a night out use roughly 0.2ml. Sounds trivial. But most blokes apply aftershave like they’re putting out a fire, and at those rates, they might as well douse themselves in premium diesel and save the difference.
Petrol prices are grim. Nobody disputes that. But next time you stand at the pump, watching the total climb while silently composing a strongly worded letter to nobody in particular, consider this: litre for litre, unleaded remains one of the cheapest fluids in your daily life.
It’s everything else that’s taking the piss.