MANILA, Philippines – While the other oil companies seesawed on price adjustments this week, independent player Unioil Petroleum Philippines Inc. went on with its own marketing strategy by offering price discounts over the Holy Week duration.

In a statement, the company noted that for every P1,000 petroleum product purchases at its participating stations, the customer can avail of P50 worth of discount.

In this period when pump prices are relentlessly rising and which subsequently exert inflationary pressures on the cost of other basic commodities, consumers are resorting to all kinds of approaches on how they can penny-pinch just to stretch their budgets.

Unioil Petroleum pointed out that its Holy Week discount takes the form of a “corporate social responsibility” mission, noting that this is its way of “giving back to our loyal motorists that always gas up in our retail stations.”

“Since the Lenten season started last Monday we are now giving away free 50 pesos worth of gasoline products with a 1,000 peso-single receipt from any of our participating stations nationwide except Unioil Airport Road,” the oil firm said.

At the very least, the company noted that “since the public are about to go on a vacation we tried to ease the burden of the consumers by giving back discounted price for them to enjoy the holiday vacation.”

This week marked the oil companies’ varied approaches to pricing – some have increased their prices at the pumps, others opted not to move while oil major Chevron rolled back a previous adjustment.

Nevertheless, as deregulation policy works on the dictates of market forces, it has been observed that ‘price matching’ were actually the norm at the gasoline stations. Even for the oil companies which jacked up their prices, they were forced to match the cheaper cost of their neighbor-stations or industry rivals just to sustain patronage of their customers.

And as price up-ticks appear to have no end in sight yet, the government has been resorting to various policy approaches on how to contain pump cost escalations; and similarly to appease the Filipino consumers who are already getting furious over the weekly oil price adjustments.

It has been experimenting on fuel assistance program to the proposed oil stockpiling, but all these seem not enough to cool down frayed nerves.

But as the country is heavily dependent on oil imports, it does not actually have much choice because the price triggers are generally coming from external factors.