The kids of today really don’t know how good they have it. In the summers of the 1970s and 1980s, children were all too often sent gingerly tiptoeing into our arctic-like seas, wearing nothing more than a pair of shiny speedos and a lot of goose bumps. Today, however, with wetsuits selling for less than €20, kids get to spend their days frolicking in the water, totally immune to the savage cold and looking like cool surfer types to boot.
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When it emerged last month that the Irish Army had been feeding a small number of its soldiers beef from Brazil, the farming lobby was enraged.
Although the beef - in ration packs given out to soldiers on manoeuvres in Ireland and overseas - was completely safe, legally imported into the State and had been supplied by the only company that had tendered for the contract, the IFA immediately dubbed the move a disgrace and demanded to know why this act of virtual high treason had been committed.
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Ryanair has announced that it is to make its web check-in free. Hurray you might be forgiven for shouting until you read further down the breathlessly written press release to the bit where they say they are also to introduce charges for people who don’t use the web check-in service. From September 20th, the simple act of presenting yourself at the check-in desk is going to cost you €3. It absolutely beggars belief. If Ryanair could charge you for the air you breath on board their flights they would.
How much salt do you eat daily and how much damage is it doing? If you’re anything like the rest of us, the answer to both questions will be too much.
On average, Irish people consume almost twice their recommended daily salt allowance with most of it buried deep inside breads and processed foods, some of which are dressed up as healthy alternatives.
It’s time to worry when not even our salads are safe to eat. A recent report from a British food safety lobby group found that although some salads are dressed up as healthy, they contain more hidden salt than a burger and fries.
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Consumers could be the winners if Vodafone, O2 and Meteor pass on the savings they will make after reaching an agreement to drop their wholesale charges to 7.99 cent by 2012. At present the operators’ wholesale rates - charges they levy on each other to connect a call to their network - vary between 10-12 cent. ComReg estimates that the industry will save €15 million next year as a result, increasing to €90-€100 million in 2012. Now, if only we could be sure they’d pass all the savings onto the consumer. . .
The man behind a Russian music download site which was selling MP3s at a fraction of the cost of comparable services in the west the has been cleared of copyright infringement. His allofmp3.com Web site really really annoyed the major record companies by selling newly released albums for just one euro. It was too good to last however and earlier this year credit card companies stopped allowing customers to pay the site for music downloads and by July it had quietly closed down. It remains to be seen if the site can be resurrected.
Marie McCormack contacted us with a tale of woe in connection with her broadband connection. In June 2006, she rang broadband provider Perlico and signed up to one of its deals which had a price tag of €19.99 a month. It meant she had to switch her landline, which she did, and give her direct debit details over the phone.
A week later, her phoneline was switched over and the wait for the broadband modem started.
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A grocery price survey carried out on behalf of the National Consumer Agency (NCA) at the end of July made depressing reading and seemed to show that Irish shoppers have little choice but to pay high prices for most household essentials.
But maybe they don’t have to. Consumer lobby groups have suggested that the picture is incomplete as the survey ignored the elephants in the room - Lidl and Aldi - which are constantly trumpeting their lower prices.
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Here’s an article I wrote for the paper last Thursday - it’s not very consumery at all but I think it’s kinda interesting.
Forget 1759, the most important year in Irish brewing history may have been many thousands of years earlier. A pair of bleary-eyed Galway archaeologists have developed a theory that, in between all the hunting and gathering, one of the most commonly found archaeological features on the Irish landscape was used by Bronze Age man to make ale.
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A four-bedroom coastal property in the southeast has a weekly rental of €1,800 throughout the month of August. While the house is spacious, it is hardly stunning, so the rent seems steep. But it’s not enough for the owners, who are also demanding a €12 daily electricity payment from would-be holiday makers.
While no one is suggesting that the ESB gives its power away for peanuts, most Irish families would struggle to rack up more than €100 in electricity for the eight weeks of July and August, so how the owners can justify an €84 weekly charge during the summer in a holiday home fitted with solar panels is impossible to say.
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Tom Smith bought a Meteor pre-paid phone this year but has been less than impressed by the company’s habit of cutting off the people who don’t top up their credit as often as it would like.
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Susan van der Kamp got in touch about her less than happy experience on the train from Tralee to Dublin with her nine-year-old son last weekend. Her one-way ticket cost a fairly hefty €82. She says that trying to elicit information from Irish Rail staff about prices and train times led to much shoulder shrugging, mumbling and vagueness. “On boarding the expensive train I was assailed by a strong ‘lavatorial’ aroma and almost sat on a seat with something unidentifiable on it,” she writes. “There is a change at Mallow, which helped somewhat. I have no doubt that the trip to Dublin was overpriced for the poor quality of service and inferior seating,” not to mention uninterested staff.
PriceWatch has won the lottery on six occasions in the last fortnight. Official-looking messages telling us of our remarkable good fortune have come flooding in from lottery companies all over the world and jackpots have been scooped in Australia, the US, Britain and Spain and, of course, Ireland.
And if we’re not winning the lottery, our name is being plucked from some “register of good persons” in Nigeria or Sierra Leone where we are listed as a person of “sufficient trustwordiness” (sic) to come to the aid of the widow of an African dictator who’s been left with nothing but two huge trunks of US dollars which she needs to shepherd out of the country using our bank account.
ON OCCASION, PRICEWATCH has replied to these mails using the e-mail address anaiveeejit@hotmail.com just to see how long the scammers can themselves be scammed. The best chain to date has been 18 e-mails, six long phone calls from Amsterdam to an Irish mobile phone number and one futile visit by a man known only as Mr Anderson to Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport, where he expected to meet E’ejit off a flight from Dublin.
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