There is a problem with petrol sales: unless you do huge volumes, the margins are just too thin. This is leading to the wholesale closure of rural petrol stations. In the long run, this will be detrimental to country life. It occurs to me that rural stations have another option, as follows:
1. They could drop their price per litre to being practically at cost;
2. They could charge a flat fee "service charge" of, say, €2 or €3 on every petrol sale - you could simply set the pump to start at €2 instead of zero.
Petrol would still, obviously, be dearer overall in rural petrol stations, but the rural customer - instead of having an incentive to just buy five litres of petrol to get into the Tesco station in town - would now have an incentive to fill up, so as to minimise the per-litre cost.
I don't see any other way for rural petrol stations to remain economically viable; frankly, I am surprised this hasn't already been tried.