Make it stop!
This I found mesmerising. Then depressing. Very, very depressing.
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Mr Pharmacist, I insist
Nearly half the State’s 1500 pharmacists have said they will pull out of the community drugs schemes in response to the Government’s plan to cut their payments and the Irish Pharmacists Union has warned that more could follow. They say that they will no longer dispense medicines under the medical card and drugs payments schemes and if the threat is carried out there will be chaos across the country as people struggle to get their hands on essential medicines. Judging from the amount of complaints I get about the high cost of prescription and OTC medicines in this country compared with elsewhere, people are deeply suspicious of pharmacists and the money they are making and I reckon they risk alienating consumers further if they escalate their dispute with the Government.
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It’s your own fault
Busy day today. We have Tesco rolling out its price cutting campaign in the Capital (a mystery celebrity is going to help them at their midday launch but their press people have steadfastly refused to tell me who it is - I’m beside myself with excitement. Who might it be!!! Afternoon update: It was Gerry Ryan - am gutted)
It’s not all good news for the retailer monster as it has also been forced to defend itself against charges that it has already upped the price of dozens of the products it claimed were permanently lowered less than two months ago.
And then there is the publication of the Competition Authority’s much anticipated report aimed at getting to the bottom of the sometimes shocking price differentials that exist north and south of the border. after months and months of beavering away behind the scenes it turns out it’s all our own fault. Well, that’s not strictly speaking true, the Government is also asked to shoulder some of the responsibility while higher overheads also contribute to the higher costs, but mostly it’s down to us. The one group who is in no way to blame for the sometimes huge price differentials - no siree bob - are the retailers. They are, the Authority tells us, completely blameless and shame on all of us who thought otherwise.
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What to do?
What do you do if you’re served food in a restaurant which, when it comes, turns out to be pretty horrible?
A) Eat it and tell the waiter everything was fine?
B) Push it round the plate to create the impression that you ate it and tell the waiter that everything was fine?
C) Don’t eat it and snarl at the waiter before paying for the meal and leaving just less than ten per cent as a tip?
D) Complain and refuse to pay for the meal?
E) Complain, refuse to pay for the meal and demand compensation for being served inedible slop?The reason I ask is that recently I was in a well regarded restaurant where I ordered a fish dish which the place was well known for – a cod and chorizo cazuela as it happens. The meal came and the cod was inedible – mushy, cold and absolutely vile. I’d name the restaurant only I have no proof that the cod was mushy, cold and absolutely vile so they’d probably take me to the cleaners in the High Court for slandering them. Anyways, for only the second time in my life I called over the waiter and asked him to take it back.
He was mildly apologetic and said he would talk to the chef - I can just imagine how that conversation went: ‘There’s some bollix out there who doesn’t like your food. Will we spit on his dessert?’ And that was the end of it. When I called for the bill a little while later he told me, with the demeanour of a cat who’s just left a present of a rat on my kitchen floor, that he’d taken the cod off the bill. ‘Well, that’s very good of you,’ I thought, ‘seeing as how I only had two disgusting mouthfuls of it’.
So I paid for the rest of the meal – which was not, it has to be said, particularly good – and left feeling just a bit hard done by – and hungry. Very, very hungry.
How should a restaurant react to a complaint like this? Do the bare minimum and take the offending meal off the bill? Throw in complimentary desserts or coffees or glasses of wine? Tear up the bill, completely? And what should I have expected of them? I’m not sure but I am absolutely certain that the restaurant’s response was so poor that I will never darken its doors again.
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Better value at Supervalu
Another front in the supermarket prices wars has been opened after Supervalu rolled out €86m worth of fresh price reductions. It takes to €200m, the number of price cuts the store says have been implemented since the beginning of the year.
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Hmmmm. . . tinned sausages
Tesco today recalled its cans of Value Beans and Sausage after pieces of plastic were found in a number of cans although I would have thought the plastic could only have been an improvement on what is, by most definitions a pretty dodgy product. Actually, while I might turn my nose up at low price sausages in a tin now, there was a time - and I’m not proud to admit this - when I absolutely loved them and I had more than one hissy fit in our local supermarket when my mammy refused to buy them. To be fair to me I was, only 17.
Er, 7, I meant to say 7.
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Red-letter day for ESB customers
Lasy week I featured a story from a person who received a threatening solicitor’s letter from the ESB about his last month’s payment after he switched from the ESB to Bord Gáis Energy.
An ESB spokeswoman said that the letter was sent out “inadvertently” as a result of a glitch in the system and she denied that such an approach was common practice.
It turns out he was not the only one to get legal missives from the ESB, as our readers were quick to point out. A reader called Holly “was sent a similarly threatening letter demanding payment of €11.93 (for a bill which I never received)”. She says that “failure to comply within seven days would have led to a debt collector being sent to pick up the tab – and I only received the letter eight days after it was dated. I am ever so glad that ESB has finally let my account go to Bord Gáis, after three months of waiting for us to be switched over. To hell with them.”
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It’s not a gas at all
I spent weeks earlier this year advising anyone who asked me – and quite a few who didn’t – to make the switch from the ESB to Bord Gais and when I was asked what the catch was I insisted there was absolutely none – switch and save, I said. That was of course before I knew that by switching we were effectively handing over our bank details to a bunch of halfwits who would store them all on a single laptop which they wouldn’t bother encrypting.
The computer was thieved earlier this month - of course it was - and now 75,000 of us will have to monitor our bank accounts for Lord knows how long to keep an eye out for suspicious transactions. The office of the data protection commissioner has warned that fraudsters could potentially use information taken from this laptop to withdraw money from accounts or take out loans in their name. “The risk may be low but there is a risk,” deputy data protection commissioner Gary Davis said.
On our breaking news service today Conor Lally says Bord Gáis is to write to its customers tomorrow and has started contacting the main banks to inform them how many of their customer’s details are on the non encrypted stolen machine.
The managing director of Bord Gais Energy, Dave Bunworth said he “deeply regretted” the theft of a machine that was not encrypted. “We have had an aggressive system of encrypting since last July and this computer should have been encrypted before it was given to the staff member; it was a flaw in the system.”
As I said, halfwits.
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Every little helps
Here’s the story I had in the paper today about M&S:
MARKS AND Spencer is to significantly reduce the prices of all its clothes, homeware and furniture in the Republic from tomorrow but has stopped short of introducing its “permanent price cuts” in its food halls.
The British retailer says it is dropping prices in the affected departments by an average of 12 per cent in response to the economic downturn and continuing consumer concerns about the price discrepancies which exist between M&S outlets in the Republic and in the UK.
Dubbed “We’ve listened, we’ve lowered”, the price-cutting campaign is the latest salvo in a retailer price war which started last month when Tesco Ireland announced a major stock restructuring and price reductions averaging 22 per cent.
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Meatless
Put down that breakfast roll, it’s Meat Free Monday.
Meat Free what now? The new initiative is being heavily pushed this morning by the world’s most famous vegan Paul McCartney. He is trying to convince people to go without meat for just one day every week in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the world’s livestock.While the amount of ‘celebs’ who have rallied around the cause is mildly irksome (Kelly Osbourne take a bow ) – the campaign does have a point (assuming of course you’re wealthy enough to be able to afford the luxury of choice). Meat is responsible for around 18 per cent of the planet’s greenhouse gas emissions and huge tracts of the Amazonian rainforest are cleared every year to make space for cattle ranches and feed.
And quite apart from environmental concerns, the idea makes perfect sense from a health and wealth perspective too. Vegetarian food can be cooked for half nothing while people who eat less meat tend to be thinner than those who stuff themselves with steaks and burgers and sausages and the like every day of their lives. And with that I’m off to Cornucopia for me lunch.
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Restaurant death watch
Another couple of restaurants in Dublin appear to be on the verge of closure today with the Town Bar and Grill and Eden joining Tante Zoe’s in the queue for Crisis Corner this week. While none have gone the way of Mint and Rhodes and actually shut their doors for good yet, the owners appear to be pretty gloomy about their survival prospects. It is a great shame as I have had nice meals in all three over the last ten years.
There will be a whole lot more very high profile casualties before the recession finally bottoms out – I’d name a few I reckon will go only I’d be afraid of getting crushed under the weight of the solicitors letters - but I really hope the places that have consistently provided good food at comparatively low prices such as L’Gueleton and the Winding Stair (and Gruel with its lovely sausages and mash…. hmmmmmmm sausages * drool *) will survive as, if nothing else, they will give all the failed restaurateurs who got away with charging inflated prices for average food during the Celtic Tiger years, a template from which to operate in the future.
Maybe we shoudl compile a list of the best value restaurants in the country that we want to see survive come what may? Anyone got any suggestions?
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Wrong turn costs a lotta Luas change
An unfortunate series of events left Doireann Murray substantially out of pocket last month. It started when she parked in what was described as an overflow car park adjacent to the Stillorgan Luas stop.
When she went to pay for the day’s parking, she realised she had left her wallet at home. She rang Q-Park, the company in charge of the Luas car parks, to explain the situation and to ask if she could pay the following day. “I have done this on a few occasions in the past and it has never been a problem,” she says. “The man I was talking to was very helpful and said it would be no problem at all. He asked where exactly I was parked, took my registration and told me to leave a note on the windscreen and he would ring the guy in charge of the car park and tell him to look out for the note.”
She did as she was told and, the next day, when she went to pay for her parking on the way to work, she was less than pleased to discover her car had been clamped. She rang Q-Park who said they would ring the clamper straight away. “A few minutes later the guy in charge of the clamping rang me and said that he had just been down to the car park and there were no cars in the clamping log. He asked me to repeat my reg number and again he said the car wasn’t there.”
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I’m back
Just back from my holidays in Nice, which was nice. The only downside was that having taken them so early, I now have nothing to look forward to for the rest of the summer, which is just a bit depressing, almost as depressing, in fact, as arriving in Dublin Airport where, as usual, everything seemed chaotic and miserable and decidedly claustrophobic.
While I was away I had to have a couple of stitches removed from the head of a small child – a long and traumatic story. I was told by a rep at the (gl)ampsite where we were staying that the best thing to do would be go to the A&E unit of the local hospital where we would be seen to in a matter of minutes.
“I can’t do that, it’s not an emergency,” I said and the rep suggested we go to a private clinic adjacent to the hospital and pay to have the stitches removed. So that is what we did – we arrived for a midday appointment five minutes early, and were seen straight away. And how much did it cost ?
Seven. Euro.
I was sure that something had been lost in translation and I was being asked to pay €70 but no, €7 was all the doctor wanted. I pay nearly ten times that at home so my GP can tell me that that I have an unspecified virus “that should clear up in a week or so” – a diagnosis that is up there with “he’s just not himself” when it comes to helpfulness.
And while I’m on the topic of things that are better in other places, Carrefour is a much, much nicer supermarket than anything we have in Ireland and a whole lot cheaper too. Recently I reviewed chocolate desserts and gave five stars to Rians Le Fondant au Chocolat which cost €3.75 in Fallon & Byrne. While it seems like a fairly exclusive brand in this country, it is all over the place in and, at the risk of repeating myself, how much did it cost?
€1.65 or less than half the price in Dublin’s posh delis.
Mind you one thing that cost a whole lot more was internet access. I would have blogged from there but the campsite wanted me to pay a tenner an hour to access the web, a price which was completely outlandish by any reckoning.
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Don’t pay the fireman…
A listener to the Ray Darcy show contacted me last week with a problem which is just bonkers. Two months ago she was in a small car accident with another car. No one was injured but at the scene she called 999 – as you do - and requested the gardai and an ambulance. The fire brigade also came out and she thought nothing of it. Until last week when she got a bill from the county council for a fire tender. And how much was she being charged? €1,117. She rang and explained that she didn’t call the fire brigade and nor were they required but was told it was procedure for them to scramble when 999 was called. She was also told her bill was a little bit more expensive because the accident happened on a Saturday so the firemen were on double time.
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Shocking holy costs
LAST MONDAY morning there was a parade of young girls posing for photographs in Dublin’s Mountjoy Square. As the first warm sun of summer bounced off their dazzlingly white parasols, the little girls did little twirls and their proud parents beamed and snapped away at digital cameras.
Fast forward seven days and it is a racing certainty that the parasols have joined the dresses, shoes and all the other accessories in cupboards where they will attract no further attention, except perhaps from the moths who will feast on them in the years to come.
While dressing a child up at enormous expense like a mini-bride may seem like one of the first of the Celtic Tiger excesses to go in the current climate, as this year’s Communion season draws to a close, reports suggest quite the contrary.
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Farmers protest at Tesco
Around 100 farmers stormed a Tesco outlet in Navan this evening, filled trolleys to the brim with groceries, locked them together and used them to block the aisles in protest at the food price reductions rolled out by the store last week. It sounds like a novel demonstration and the farmers may well have a point but I’d have to question the timing. If they wanted to get themselves substantial coverage either on TV or in print, 9pm on a Friday is not really the best time to stage a protest. And having worked in a supermarket stacking shelves on a Friday evening, I feel awful sorry for the people working their tonight who’ll have to clean up the mess.
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Them green shoots are mighty small
I got a bit of lift yesterday when I overhead a conversation in a lift suggesting that the ESRI was due to publish an “optimistic” report in which it would predict that the economy was going to grow “quite rapidly”.
Wayhay!!! I thought, there’s life in that Celtic Tiger yet. Then I read the reports this morning and was just a bit miffed to learn that me and my lift source have entirely different definitions of optimistic.
According to the ESRI if everything goes swimmingly in the global economy (and there’s absolutely no guarantee that will happen) and we all accept pay cuts and take more savage budget measures on the chin, then we just might see some class of bounce by 2015.
That’s six years away.
Sigh.
Still, it could be worse. I could be Brian Cowen.
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It’s war baby!
Say what you like about the Supermarket Wars, they are bringing down prices all over the shop. And all those full page ads that have been popping up in the paper are a bit of a boost too!
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More annoying Ryanair fees
The actual seats might be cheap but some of the add-on charges associated with flying Ryanair take the biscuit (that’ll be €2). Yesterday it issued a press release announcing that people who book flights from May 20th will have to check in online before arriving at the airport, which is grand.
Sort of.
Up until now, folk who used Ryanair’s airport check-in desks were charged €10 while those who checked-in online did not pay anything – presumably because there was little or not costs associated with online check-in. Well, now there is. The tenner charge has been scrapped (Yay!) but has been replaced by a fee of €5 fee per person, per flight irrespective of how they check in.
And printer’s ink must be at a premium at the low fair airline because it is also introducing a new penalty of €40 for re-issuing boarding cards that has already been printed.
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Battle of the bowl
THE UK’S long-running sugar wars were reignited towards the end of last month when the almost universally respected consumer magazine Which? published one of its infrequent reports into the state of the breakfast cereal market and again found most of the big name brands wanting.
The report, titled “Going Against the Grain”, found the sugar levels in many cereals reviewed to be “shockingly high”, and it described as “particularly worrying” the fact that so many high-sugar cereals were still being marketed to children. It said a number of adult cereals, including Special K and Bran Flakes, are dressed up as healthy alternatives but actually contain more sugar than a bowl of chocolate fudge ice-cream, which is quite a distance from how the svelte, wholesome characters in the advertising campaigns represent them.
The manufacturers, who are no strangers to such charges, had their responses ready in a heartbeat. The consumer body’s study was effectively rubbished as the big brands pushed the line that their breakfast cereals were wholesome and entirely unconnected to the growing levels of childhood and adult obesity in Britain.
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