Pricewatch

  • The mechanics of a car scam

    March 31, 2008 @ 10:56 am | by Conor Pope

    I got a letter from a listener to the Ray Darcy show last week. She was tempted by the extremely low price of a car being advertised on autotrader.ie. The car would usually be worth around €20,000 but the seller only wants €7000. She contacted the woman by the email address listed and was told she was selling it so cheaply because she had moved to Spain and the car had its steering wheel on the right hand side so nobody wanted to buy it over there. She was asked to make a 50 per cent down payment to eBay and her money would be kept safely by them until she got the car after which she had 14 days to test/inspect it. “Have you heard of scams like this? Is there any safe way for me to proceed?,” she asked.

    No is the short answer. The car is a 2006 Audi A3 with 19,800 miles on the clock. It’s apparently in immaculate condition, has an alarm, a full service history, central locking, electric windows and sounds absolutely great. In fact the only real problem with it is that it doesn’t exist or if it does it is not being sold by Maria in Spain for this kind of price.

    I contacted the seller directly expressing an interest in the car using an email address I have set up specially for this purpose – anaiveeejit@hotmail.com.

    Here’s the correspondence so far (all the typos are ‘Maria’s’) . . . I’m not sure how I should end it. Send an April Fool’s Day message or keep stringing “her” along? All suggestions welcome.

    (more…)

  • No budging on car park ticket

    @ 10:03 am | by Conor Pope

    Anna Lester from Dublin contacted us to relate “the worst shopping experience” of her life which happened in Tesco in the Bloomfield Centre, Dún Laoghaire earlier this month. She decided to use the self-service checkout in the store because few of the manned registers were open and long queues had formed at those that were open.

    “I diligently obeyed all the prompts on the checkout screen. I scanned all the items, got authorisation for four separate items on four separate occasions, cleared the conveyer belt when requested and rescanned ‘unauthorised items’.” After jumping through all the hoops, she paid the €180 bill with a credit card and packed her shopping. It was at this point she remembered her parking ticket and asked an assistant to validate it. “He said he couldn’t because it had to be done before payment. I then asked to speak to someone who could do so. He informed me that it could not be done by anyone at this stage.” Our reader insisted on speaking to someone more senior and eventually an assistant manager came forward who told her the same thing: the computer system could not be bypassed and apparently it was all the fault of the car park in the first place.
    (more…)

  • Sell your home yourself?

    @ 10:02 am | by Conor Pope

    High percentage-based commissions, and question marks over what some estate agents do to earn them, have seen a growing number of people with houses to sell looking for cheaper alternatives. And when you consider the potential savings that can be made, it’s not hard to see why.

    As house prices rocketed through the boom years so did the fees some estate agents pocketed. If a house in Ranelagh sold for €200,000 in 1998, an estate agent made anywhere between €2,000 and €4,000 plus VAT for facilitating the sale. Today, the same house might sell for €1 million with the agent’s slice anywhere between €10,000 and €20,000 - up over 400 per cent in 10 years.

    As the market moves from a sellers’ one to one which favours buyers, many sellers are looking at ways to speed up the process and cut down on costs. Some of the more progressive, consumer-focused estate agents have recognised the need to offer better value and now charge flat fees instead of a percentage of the eventual selling price.

    Another, even cheaper alternative may be the DIY option. Self-sellers can go it completely alone with a handmade sign and their own advertising, but there are also Irish online services offering sales support to homeowners through the provision of professional-looking For Sale boards and advertising on their websites. Estimates of how many people sell privately in Ireland vary between 3 and 10 per cent, a number which pales in comparison to the US where over 30 per cent of properties are sold privately - although the commissions charged by US realtors would make their Irish counterparts green with envy.
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  • A reader’s question

    March 28, 2008 @ 7:42 pm | by Conor Pope

    This question came in this afternoon:

    Conor, I was wondering if you can help me. Back in October I signed up for a membership in a well known Dublin gym. Since then, I have moved away from the area. On the contract I have signed it says that it “is non cancellable within the initial 12 month period”. Can this be right or can I hand in written notice, stating my intention to stop paying the direct debit and hence cancelling my membership? Is there any way I can get out of this contract without buying out the remainder? Thanking you in advance for your help.

    The really bad news is that you’re going to have to keep paying until the initial 12 month period has elapsed. Once the contract has been signed you are legally committed to paying for the minimum duration as stated in the contract. You can stop the direct debit but this doesn’t alter the fact that you’re liable to pay for the rest of the year and I would not be at all surprised if they gym hounded you for it even to the extent of threatening legal action. It’s incredibly annoying but there’s nothing you can really do about it except curse them and make sure it doesn’t happen again. The importance of reading the small print can not be overstated when it comes to gym membership. The other really important thing now is to make sure you don’t get hit for the same charges next year. Some gyms operate a rollover or sneak an automatic renewal clause into their contracts so if you don’t tell them in writing that you don’t want to renew your membership, it will automatically continue for another 12 months.

  • Cheaper childcare

    March 26, 2008 @ 7:46 pm | by Conor Pope

    Could this be the solution to the rising cost of childcare in Ireland?

  • Wait a minute, that camera does so lie!

    March 25, 2008 @ 10:50 pm | by Conor Pope

    food.jpgI just came across this excellent site which puts the photographs that appear on various packets of food alongside what’s actually inside those boxes. You’ll not be surprised to learn that, on occasion, there is quite a difference between the two. The site is entirely in German and the thumbnails could do with being just a bit bigger but it’s still well worth a visit. And staying with food photography, the fine folk over at the Consumerist pointed me in the direction of an article at Photocritic which says that amongst the items any half decent food photographer needs to make his food look lovely includes motor oil, cotton balls, brown shoe polish and glue.

    Hmmmmm, motor oil.

  • No smiles for a price-sensitive toothpaste

    March 24, 2008 @ 4:44 pm | by Conor Pope

    Brian Price contacted us about the high cost of toothpaste in Ireland. At his dentist’s recommendation, he uses Sensodyne Extra Fresh, which, he says, can cost anywhere from €4.99 in Dunnes, to €6.75 in a pharmacy close to where he works. “I had no problem with that until a recent trip to Spain, where exactly the same paste is on sale for €1.99. I was incensed by what I saw as another case of profiteering in Rip-Off Ireland.”

    He called the manufacturers and “a nice lady” tried to explain to him why it was more expensive in Ireland. He was told there was “multiple, various” reasons why the product costs over 200 per cent less in Spain than his local pharmacy in Dublin. Old favourites including VAT, and other taxes were trotted out to explain the price differential.

    “When I tried to get her to specify, she could not,” he writes. “I gave her my home address and asked her to think about it, and write to me with an explanation of why it was so expensive here. She suggested the European Consumer Centre may be able to answer my questions, which I found astonishing, as they couldn’t possibly know about internal company pricing policy,” he says. He suggested that maybe the toothpaste is manufactured in both Ireland and Spain which might explain the substantial difference. “She quite clearly said no, it’s not manufactured in Spain. To summarise, a product that is manufactured in Ireland, and exported to Spain, can cost over 200 per cent more in Ireland than Spain. Go figure.”

    We called the makers to find out more. A spokeswoman for GlaxoSmithKline said that while it had no control over the price its products are sold for in stores because “as a matter of law, retailers must be free to set the prices at which they sell their products to consumers,” it was “surprised at the price differences that were highlighted to us which show a much bigger gap than our Recommended Retail Prices (RRP) in Ireland and Spain. This may reflect the type of outlet they were purchased in and indeed the possibility of a promotional price being in place in Spain.” She said there was a difference in tax structure, operational costs, distribution, selling and marketing practices in each country and this is reflected in the retail selling prices of products. “GSK works hard to keep its prices competitive and, in fact, the differential between Irish and Spanish prices on Sensodyne [ which is made in England] is far less than on other leading toothpaste brands,” she added.

  • Change exchange

    @ 4:43 pm | by Conor Pope

    Eamonn Byrne sent us a mail with an interesting question. He wants to know why we are not seeing reduced prices in our shops as a result of the spectacular appreciation of the euro against sterling in recent months. “There is a huge amount of our everyday groceries sourced in the UK. I cannot see any evidence of prices falling in my local Superquinn. I’m sure it’s the same in Tesco, Dunnes etc,” he writes. “The same is true in British shops such as M&S, Next, Debenhams. At best the exchange rate will be £0.67 to €1 but can be close to £0.50 in places like Claire’s Accessories,” he says.

    “Up until a few months ago the exchange rate was £0.67 to €1. Now it is almost £0.77. This is a difference of around 14 per cent. The euro continues to rise, when is this going to translate into reduced prices?” he asks. “The public need to be made aware that the retailers are not passing on the savings. If the rate was going the other way, we’d get a much faster response.”

  • Rent a rip-off

    @ 4:43 pm | by Conor Pope

    Karl Cronin happened upon an interesting fact when shopping around for a rental car for his holiday in Sardinia. “While trying to book a car for eight days in April, I accidentally went into the UK Avis site first and was quoted £229 (€305) for a VW Golf or similar. In order to get the euro price I switched to www.avis.ie and was quoted €468, a whopping €163 or 50 per cent more for the same product in the same country on the same terms. How can they possibly justify such a mark-up on the Irish site?”

  • Five questions I’d like answered

    March 20, 2008 @ 10:50 pm | by Conor Pope

    Since when did buying light bulbs become so feckin complicated? Didn’t there used to be just two types of bulbs – ones that screwed in and ones that kind of slotted in? Well now it’s all screwed up. I’ve spent the last three weeks trying to find a replacement for a lamp in my sitting room and have been knocked back every time. There is a dazzling array of bulbs in my local supermarkets, most of which look almost, but not quite, identical to the one I need. I’ve taken to carrying the dead bulb in my pocket whenever I go out and am just waiting for the moment it breaks as I’m fumbling for my keys and little slivers of glass tear my hands to pieces.

    Why is buying printer cartridges so complicated (and so expensive)? I bought a new printer three months ago, managed to coax it into to printing six pages (okay, it might have been ten) and already the black cartridge is empty and replacements are as hard to find as a poxy light bulb.

    Mothercare – why are all the staff so grumpy and unhelpful every time I go in?

    What’s the appropriate response when you’re left standing at the till in your local Spar shop, litre of milk in hand, for more than two minutes while the single shop “assistant” texts his buddy with all the speed and dexterity of a blind sheep?

    Does anyone ever watch the Afternoon Show?

  • Reebok fined over toxic bracelets

    March 18, 2008 @ 10:19 pm | by Conor Pope

    reebok.jpgReebok has been fined one million dollars following a 2006 recall of 300,000 bracelets which were found to contain toxic levels of lead and resulted in the death of a child in the US. The bracelets were given away free with various styles of children’s trainers. In March 2006, a 4-year-old boy from Minneapolis who swallowed the bracelet’s heart-shaped pendant died. “This civil penalty sends a clear message that the Consumer Product Safety Commission will not allow companies to put children’s safety at risk,” a CPSC spokeswoman said. “Preventing dangerous metal jewellery from reaching the hands of children is a priority for our agency,” she said. Adidas, which bought Reebok in 2005, recently announced profits for 2007 of $835 million, a sum which puts the fine into perspective.

  • Strips of mole poached in Ovaltine…

    March 17, 2008 @ 9:42 pm | by Conor Pope

    In case you missed it, Giles Coren reviewed Goodfellas, the Belfast restaurant at the centre of a controversial libel award in the Times on Saturday.

  • Unfair Play

    @ 6:06 pm | by Conor Pope

    An angry reader in Rathfarnham was prompted to get in touch with us after noticing a currency discrepancy, which works against Irish shoppers, on the Play.com website. While the website quotes prices in sterling and euro, they will only deliver to Ireland if you order using the euro rate. He cites The Last Splash by The Breeders, which has a price tag of £4.99 and €7.99. According to the exchange rates in the middle of last week, £4.99 equals €6.51, so our reader wants to know why the site is “really fleecing the euro-based customer by 23 per cent on foreign exchange”.

  • Vendor spender

    @ 6:06 pm | by Conor Pope

    Richard Joyce contacted us in relation to the price of crisps in a vending machine in Pearse Street Dart Station. While waiting for his train he’s often partial to a bag of Hunky Dory crisps. At least he used to be.

    “I’ve stopped buying them recently as there has been an exorbitant price increase. They previously cost 70 cent, but last month the price was increased to 90 cent - a 29 per cent increase,” he writes. “To demonstrate the haphazard way that they put the price up, they didn’t even have new price labels for the machine, but instead wrote the new price on a piece of masking tape and stuck it on over the original vending machine label.”

    He points out that, as the main cost in Ireland these days seems to be labour, how can a 29 per cent price increase on vending machine-distributed foods be justified?

  • Long chase for a chaise longue

    @ 6:06 pm | by Conor Pope

    At the end of September last year Bernadette Banahan ordered and paid for a left-hand classic chaise longue sofa in Marks & Spencer in Dublin. Five weeks later the piece of furniture was delivered, but instead of being a left-hand piece it was a right-hand one. She rejected the delivery, and she was assured it would be rectified and was given a new order number.

    Just before Christmas the the M&S delivery people called around again, but yet again it was a right-hand chaise. She was given yet another replacement order number and was assured the chaise would be with her in the New Year.
    (more…)

  • Happy St Patrick’s Day

    March 15, 2008 @ 4:09 pm | by Conor Pope

    The most read story on ireland.com today is not from today, this month or even this year. It’s a story from Breaking News last July and is headlined: St Patrick’s ‘day’ moved to 15th . In case you forgot, last year the Catholic Church moved our patron saint’s special day from next Monday because it clashed with the second day of Holy Week - a big no no apparently. So, technically, today is St Patrick’s Day - that must explain the absolutely horrible weather then.

  • No need to queue

    @ 3:00 pm | by Conor Pope

    Where were all the queues yesterday morning when the iPhone went on sale in Ireland? Nowhere, in spite of the heavy promotion and all the hype which heralded the arrival of the hippest of phones. According to this morning’s Irish Times there was just one person in the queue outside the Carphone Warehouse on Grafton Street at 8am yesterday . O2 CEO Danuta Grey had promised that “Apple freaks” would be “queuing out the door” for the iPhone and while they weren’t, a spokesman said the reaction was “great” and sales were going “really well”.The lack of queues was attributed to the fact that so many had pre-ordered phones online although the high price and the fact that the iPhone is so last year might also have had something to do with it!

  • Broadband providers adopt new ad code

    March 13, 2008 @ 8:53 pm | by Conor Pope

    Broadband operators will have to significantly alter their promotional material from the beginning of next month so it more accurately reflects the actual download speeds available to subscribers. At present many broadband providers use their advertising to stress the maximum connection speed available through their service and only include the phrase “up to” in a font which, critics say, is all too easy to miss. The new code will take affect on April 7th, after which operators advertising maximum speeds will also have to tell potential customers what is the average broadband speed attained by their service during “the busiest hour” of the week, averaged over the previous quarter.
    (more…)

  • My DVD player hell

    March 12, 2008 @ 10:48 pm | by Conor Pope

    mars2.jpgSo I borrowed the DVD box set of Life On Mars off Charlie earlier in the week and, having heard so many good things about the programme was really looking forward to watching it. Last night I saw the first episode and it was brilliant. Instantly engaging, novel and funny. So tonight my entire evening revolved around watching the second episode (I have a small baby and no social life, you see) . Except there was a problem.

    The remote for my DVD player is on the blink and there seems to be no way for me to skip to the second programme on the disc. I can either watch all the programmes on the disc from the beginning or not watch it at all. The poxy DVD player does not even have a fast forward button which would allow me to start watching the first episode which I’ve seen and skip through it at high speed.

    So now I have three choices – watch every second episode (there are two of them on each disc you see), sort out the DVD remote (but other than changing the batteries, which I’ve done, how can I do that?) or throw the stupid DVD player in the canal and send a rage-filled letter to the people at Philips. Why on earth would they have a machine that was so utterly dependent on the remote?

    Sigh. Still, the first episode was really good.

  • Gaillimh Abu

    March 11, 2008 @ 5:47 pm | by Conor Pope

    Galway is Ireland’s most expensive city for hotel rooms, according to the hotel price index (HPI) published today by website hotels.com. Guests paid a fairly steep average price of €137 for a night in a Galway hotel - a 4 per cent rise on the previous year. Cork is the second most expensive city with prices of €125 per night while the average cost of a night in a Dublin hotel was €116.

  • Value4Money: Graters

    @ 9:48 am | by Conor Pope

    It’s not often the cheapest product I review comes out on top of the pile, but I’m glad to say it happened this week.
    (more…)

  • Record companies target ISP in Irish first

    March 10, 2008 @ 9:26 pm | by Conor Pope

    Four major record companies went into the High Court this afternoon in an effort to force Eircom to take measures to stop its networks being used for the illegal downloading of music. The MD of EMI records and chairman of the Irish Recorded Music Association Willie Kavanagh told the court that because of illegal downloading and other factors, the Irish music industry had experienced “a dramatic and accelerating decline” in income, with the Irish market suffering a decline in total sales from €146 million in 2001 to €102 million last year.

    Eircom’s lawyers said the company was not on notice of specific illegal activity that infringed the rights of the companies and had no legal obligation to monitor traffic on its network, reports Mary Carolan on the Irish Times Breakinge News site. Mr Kavanagh said that, “with the greatest of respect” to Eircom, it was “well aware” its facilities were being used to violate the property rights of record companies. The case is due to be held in the Commercial Court. I’m not sure how much can be said about the action, given the fact that the matter is now before the courts, but it certainly is a story that looks set to run and run.

  • Shameless plug

    @ 4:36 pm | by Conor Pope

    stopwasting.jpgMy little savings book is out now and available from all (or at least some) good, average and pretty bad book bookstores nationwide. Thanks to those of you who submitted money saving tips for it - some of them will have found themselves into the very last chapter and a free copy will be winging its way to you presently. In the meantime, here’s what the cover looks like. If you go looking for the book and can’t find it, I’d be grateful if you could let me know as that way I can hassle the publishers to find out why it’s not where you are.

  • Best foot forward

    @ 2:57 pm | by Conor Pope

    “You have been highlighting customer service recently and I just thought that an instance of good customer service should be reported,” writes Alison McDonald. She bought a pair of Ecco hiking boots in an Ecco shop in Dún Laoghaire in January. “I was in Dublin last week when I noticed a rip on the side of one of the boots. I went into an Ecco shop on Wicklow Street to see would I be entitled to a repair even though I didn’t have a receipt and was in a different branch to the one where they were bought. A very helpful girl took one look at them and I was immediately issued with a new pair, the old ones were taken from me and I was back on the street in about two minutes. If that’s not good service, I don’t know what is,” she says.

  • Can’t bank on getting assistance

    @ 2:55 pm | by Conor Pope

    A reader from Dublin is having “terrible trouble” dealing with the Bank of Scotland over the issuing of an insurance cheque. She switched her mortgage to the bank last August but, the first time she needed any assistance, she ran into severe difficulty.

    She had work done on her chimney recently which was covered by her home insurance policy, and the assessors issued the €5,000 cheque jointly to her and the Bank of Scotland “as is the apparently regular practice when settling claims”.

    The problem is that she can’t lodge this cheque into her own account, as the AIB, where she banks, says it’s in two names. She was told she needed to send this cheque to the Bank of Scotland who would lodge it to her mortgage account and issue a new cheque in her own name, which she could lodge and, ultimately, pay the building company who did the repairs.
    (more…)

  • Supermarket sweep

    @ 2:50 pm | by Conor Pope

    How would you like to knock €2,500 of your annual grocery shopping bill? Although food prices have been climbing internationally for months, such significant savings are just about possible for people who are a little more canny about how they shop.

    At the end of last month, an exhaustive National Consumer Agency (NCA) survey, which compared grocery prices between Ireland’s multiples, symbol groups, discounters and independents shops, was published, and it could point the way towards substantial savings for Irish consumers.
    (more…)

  • Grocery disorder

    March 7, 2008 @ 10:26 am | by Conor Pope

    Finally enterprise minister Micheál Martin has admitted that the scrapped of of the Groceries Order which banned below-cost invoicing has not succeeded in reducing food prices, despite all the promises that it would. Speaking at an EU Commission seminar in Dublin yesterday he accepted that the consequence of the abolition of the order two years ago was “not the one anticipated” Inflation for food covered by the order is in fact running higher than for goods not covered by the order according to the latest figures from the Central Statistics Office show. Cumulatively, prices for products which had been covered by the order have risen by 5.3 per cent since abolition, compared to 4.5 per cent for items that weren’t covered by the order.

  • Wired for sound

    March 6, 2008 @ 5:33 pm | by Conor Pope

    If you’re into music and think pricey audio cables are an absolute must to get the best sound out of your speakers you might want to think again. According to the Consumerist these monster cables can’t be distinguished from coat hangers with soldered on connections, not even by a group of hardened audiophiles - so a cloth-eared oaf like me would have no chance.

  • What do you think?

    March 3, 2008 @ 5:09 pm | by Conor Pope

    Last week the National Consumer Agency published an extensive survey of grocery prices. It found that while there was virtually nothing between the major supermarkets when it came to the prices for branded goods, significant savings could be made by shopping around and buying some groceries in the big discounters, Aldi and Lidl, some in the big chains like Dunnes and Tesco and more in small independent retailers such as your local greengrocer or butcher. I wonder, though, is that really practical for time pressed consumers? Do you think people are prepared to shop around for their shopping in multiple outlets or have we all got too lazy to bother with that and are happy enough to pay higher prices for just for the sake of convienence? I’d be interest to know what you think.

  • Wi charge guests for internet access?

    @ 11:20 am | by Conor Pope

    Mark Crowther was at a business meeting in the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Santry recently and was shocked by the high cost of WiFi internet access there.
    (more…)

  • Addressing post office problems

    @ 11:19 am | by Conor Pope

    A reader from Dublin was shocked by the rudeness of An Post staff in a Dublin post office recently. She called in shortly after 8am with a view to filling in a form in order withdraw some money from a savings account she had. She joined a short queue at the appropriate desk and when she got to the top asked the woman behind the counter for the form which, she says, was given to her in a very brusque and offhand fashion.
    (more…)

  • Foodies cry foul

    @ 10:38 am | by Conor Pope

    delia.jpgHave we really reached the stage where we’re too busy to chop our own onions, peel our own potatoes or even brown our own mince? Delia Smith certainly seems to think so, and has just published a book - to be accompanied by a BBC series later this month - suggesting people take a series of unlikely shortcuts en route to very fast food.

    In How to Cheat at Cooking, Smith recommends a particular brand of frozen mash, tinned lamb from Marks & Spencer, pre-chopped onions from one source and pre-chopped vegetables from another. All the convenience comes at a cost, however, and while she might believe a package of processed onions is great for time-poor people, it’s not so clever for cash-poor ones.
    (more…)

  • He’s number one!

    March 2, 2008 @ 10:06 pm | by Conor Pope

    Congrats to Shane on his triumph at the blog awards last night. Even if it did make me a total loser!

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