OCR Text |
Show THE RIGHT TO SPEAK Do It Yourself Russian Style Moscow is one of the world's largest cities, with a population in the 5 million bracket. And it has only 5 gasoline service stations! On top of that, real service is non-existant at these stations. They are do it yourself operations, operat-ions, in which tthe attendant just collects the rubles. That's what can be expected when the state is owner and boss and there's no competition. You take it and like it or go without. with-out. Contrast that with this country, where some 180,000 service stations are competing for the business of a demanding demand-ing public. And what is true of the service stations is true of all other segments of the oil industry which consists of more than 42,000 concerns of various kinds and sizes. About 12,0000 of them are involved in the production of oil, the others in refining, transportation transport-ation and so on. No company has a monopoly on anything. Competition takes more forms than most of us realize. Price, important as it is, is just one of them. Service is a top competitive weapon in any oil company's dealings with th public. And the newest new-est and fastest growing form of oil competition, the American Ameri-can petroleum Institute points out, is research. As the Institute In-stitute puts it:" Improvement of long standing oil products and development of new ones raises an oil company's market position. It's certainly good not to live is Moscow! |