The French man who paid €17 for a full fuel tank costing €90

A man from Rouen (Seine-Maritime) has managed to spend just €17 on a full tank of fuel which should have cost €90 at a Carrefour petrol station.

The supermarket chain promises customers that “if you find cheaper elsewhere, we will reimburse the difference.”

Maxime had indeed seen a cheaper price elsewhere at Total Access in Bois-Guillaume (Seine-Maritime), so when he went to the Carrefour Vatine in Mont-Saint-Aignan on March 15 he asked how the discount would work.

The manager told him that everything was explained on their website, where it said that Carrefour would reimburse two times the difference in prices if the customer could show a receipt from another petrol station within a 5km radius.

“It wasn’t complicated: a large number of stations around Rouen were less expensive,” Maxime told Actu.fr. “So I went to Total and I put a few litres [of diesel] in my car, just to get the receipt.”

He then went back to Carrefour and finished filling up his tank, at a cost of €90.

However, on the sign displayed outside the shop, it said that the brand would reimburse 10 times the difference, rather than the two promised on the website.

The difference between the price per litre at Total and at Carrefour was €7.30 if applied to a full tank of petrol, and Carrefour then multiplied this figure by ten.

However, it transpired that the sign advertising reimbursements worth 10 times the difference between stations was displayed in error.

Between March 15 and 16, the ‘10’ on the sign was crossed out, so Maxime may have been the last person to profit from the mistake.

“I told myself that if others can benefit from [the offer]” he could, he had said, adding that he was not normally “the type to search for good deals.”

Casino offers fuel at €1

Crude oil prices have fallen slightly from $140 a barrel to $104 this week, but fuel prices remain above €2 per litre across most French petrol stations.

The government has already announced a 15 cent per litre discount on almost all fuels, starting on April 1, but also urged suppliers to offer supplementary support.

Read more:French fuel prices to be reduced by 15 euro cents per litre in April

TotalEnergies was the first company to outline a further 10 cent per litre discount on fuel, which will also begin on April 1.

Read more:Fuel prices in France: TotalEnergies to offer an extra 10 centimes off

Now, Casino is bringing back its ‘fuel at €1 offer’, which will be redeemable in all of its 233 service stations today (March 18) and tomorrow.

The price paid at the pump will not change, but customers will then be able to go into the Casino store and obtain a voucher for the difference, which they can spend on supermarket products. However, this voucher can only be used if the purchases come to a total of €60 or €100, the amount depending on the shop.

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