PURPOSE The Marketing Research Committee of the API Division of Marketing has developed this standard classification and uniform terminology of gasoline and/or heating oil marketers ... to provide a common language for communication pertaining to the distribution of petroleum products@ ... to help in the collection and reporting of petroleum marketing statistics@ ... to provide a simple and practical method of combining and comparing petroleum industry statistics with data from other industries. It is emphasized@ however@ that individual petroleum marketing companies are not necessarily expected to adopt this classification and terminology to replace that which they may be using currently in their own operations and commercial documents.