Should elephants forget?

Once upon a time, a man visited a local circus.

Upon arriving he was excited to see that they had huge elephants. He had never seen an elephant before. ??

But he couldn’t believe that these beasts were tied up by a tiny rope to just one of their legs.

?“Amazing!” he pondered. “At any point, the elephants could just break free, trample all over the circus and head off back to a watering hole.”

No chains. No cages. He approached the trainer with his arms aloft. ??

“You must be the best trainer in the world. Those elephants aren’t even trying to escape!” he said.

“Actually when they were very young we used that rope and it was enough to hold them. Once they grew up, they were already conditioned to believe they couldn’t break free. They have never even tried since.”

In an industry where businesses span across multiple generations, with decades of experience in each operator, conditioning is a certainty.

The belief that you cannot break free from the chains of your competition and that you need to follow, match or beat them at any turn is still very prevalent in the fuel market today.

And as a retailer, it’s not just rope. Sometimes there are also bigger and stronger chains; market volatility, market consolidation, and reducing volumes to name a few.

What held the elephants back is that they never even tried to do something different.

But, as the story points out, doing something different also requires improvement. If the elephants stayed the same they’d still be too small (or not smart enough) to lose the rope. Changing the way you price should be part of an overall strategy to break free.

They say an elephant never forgets. Sometimes not forgetting can be to your detriment.