Editorial: I NEVER used to worry much about the price of fuel - it was only ever a few dollars more or less to fill my tank, wherever I went. Ah, the naivety of mortgage-free youth.

Now I moan along with the best of them when the price jumps 10c over night, with no apparent link to international oil prices or anything else.

While those dollars do add up in a household budget, particularly if you're covering 80-100km a day as I know many Fraser Coast people do, the bigger concern is the flow-on effect.

We all remember what happened in 2008 when prices headed close to $2 a litre: the cost of fruit, vegetables, anything transported by road skyrocketed.

And I may have blinked and missed it, but those prices don't seem to have come down.

One thing about the fuel industry does confuse me though.

I can understand why a service station owner would want to undercut the one down the road. But I can't work out why Hervey Bay petrol stations seem hesitant to get into a price competition with their rivals.

Surely it would make more business sense to have a higher turnover of fuel than to charge a few cents more? And it would give us drivers a break too.

It's a shame the larger petrol companies seem so reluctant to comment on petrol prices, despite it having such a direct impact on people's daily lives

We'd all love to know what they'd have to say.