Pricewatch

• Just stop it!

  July 31, 2008 @ 11:35 pm | by Conor Pope

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z03SEPGC_EA&rel=0

  So I was watching TV a few minutes ago, again almost flat on my back (it’s a theme of the day), when I saw this ad for Just For Men. It is, I’m guessing, trying to be cute but comes out creepy. It also made me ask way too many questions. Where’s the children’s mother? Dead, I’m thinking, but you can never be sure - maybe she ran off with a carnie. How long has she been gone? A month? A year? When is it time, exactly? What made the kids think their dad needed to dye his hair before he’d be attractive to other women? And, really, what kind of lessons is he teaching them by so readily agreeing to cosmetically alter (I was going to say enhance, but who can say?) his appearance in order to find them a replacement mother? There are so many, many things wrong with this ad that I wish I had grey hair so I could refuse to buy it.

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• Crying babies not welcome

  @ 10:37 am | by Conor Pope

  I’ve just been listening to the Ray Darcy show - flat on my back, incidentally for reasons best known to myself - and they’re running an item on a pub call Matt the Thrasher in Birdhill, Co Tipperary. Apparently it is quite a well known pub, but I have to confess to never having heard of it before this morning. A listener contacted the show to complain that the menu contained a warning that crying babies would not be tolerated in the pub/restaurant and their parents would be asked to remove them from the premises until they were settled. The owner, Ted Moynihan, came on air to defend the policy. He also defended (or at least tried to) past decisions to refuse mourners in a funeral cortege access to the toilets in the pub, while the hearse waited outside and a number of other, shall we say, strict interpretations of the door policy.

  Sounds like a delightful place.

  The show had a quick poll to see if readers agreed with the policy and nearly three thousand people voted in the space of no more than 10 minutes. Amazingly, 57 per cent agreed with the pub’s policy.

  Incidentally I’ve just had a quick look on Trip Advisor and the reviews of the pub are less than flattering to say the very the least.

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• Warning: may contain guff

  July 28, 2008 @ 2:28 pm | by Conor Pope

  There was a time when the only the makers of certain shampoos and moisturisers could get away making absolutely ridiculous claims about their products. In recent years, however, more and more manufacturers have climbed on board the crazy train and now if you take a walk through your local supermarket, you will quickly lose count of the number of foods that promise to keep you alive and gorgeous looking for longer.

  There are sugary cereal bars which use extra nutrients and calcium to distract from their calorific content, vegetable spreads that promise to lower your cholesterol in a heart beat and yoghurt drinks with unpronounceable additives which, the ads say, will improve you digestion and immunity. And because these products are even better than real food — as the manufacturers will have you believe — they can justify charging a premium for them. It’s a win win situation, for them at any rate.
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• Habi-Tat

  July 27, 2008 @ 11:18 pm | by Conor Pope

  I was at a wedding in Sligo over the last few days so completely missed the sale of century in Dublin. During the long and miserable recession of the 1980s we queued outside the US embassy and inside dole offices, but in this 21st century version we’re to be found forming an orderly line outside Habitat in search of bargains. The ultimate closing down sale apparently continues tomorrow (Monday) as long as there is stock left to sell, although the chances of anything of any use at all being left now is pretty slim.

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• Would you credit it

  @ 10:55 pm | by Conor Pope

  The practice certain airlines have of charging people hefty credit card fees comes under the Sunday Times microscope today. As has been mentioned on this blog many times, Ryanair is one such airline. It charges a €5 per flight handling fee when credit cards are used to make bookings. That means someone paying for return flights for themselves and nine of their pals is hit with €100 in handling fees for one single transaction. Ryanair says it is charged a handling fee by banks for every passenger included in a single credit card transaction but, according to Jan Battles, the banks say this is ain’t so. Typically credit card companies charge around 2 per cent of the total cost of a transaction to handle the credit card. So let’s say the you book ten return tickets to London at a cost of €50 a pop. Ryanair will charge you €100 in credit card handling fees - that’s 20 per cent of the total cost of the flights and around ten times what the credit card company will actually charge them.

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• Ice cream man

  July 23, 2008 @ 4:17 pm | by Conor Pope

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nu3TvC9CH18&rel=0

  Forget all the random street violence and stabbings in the UK, an English city council has got the real problem in its sights. Worcester City Council has introduced a strict code of conduct on ice cream men. Ice cream men of all people! New rules mean they can’t sound their chimes for longer than four seconds at a time or more than once every three minutes. Nor will they be able to sound their cheery tinkle within 50 metres of a place of worship or outside schools during school hours, And no music at all will be allowed before 12pm and after 7pm. Jonathan Richman would be turning in his grave, if he were dead, which, thankfully he isn’t

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• Recycling the good old days

  July 21, 2008 @ 10:42 am | by Conor Pope

  ‘Knickers renewed - one good pair from two old pairs; here’s how to manage it,” begins one snappy article from a collection of pamphlets originally published by the British government during the second World War and which have recently appeared in book form.

  The trick, apparently, is to cut a new gusset from the back of one pair and neatly sew it into place on the other pair and off you go, good as new.

  Make Do and Mend contains dozens of original facsimile leaflets offering hundreds of tips on how to make everything from carpets and gloves to saucepans and blinds last a whole lot longer. There are details on how to darn deftly and instructions on how best to convert a tired pair of men’s pyjamas into a reinvigorated summer frock for your daughter (although there are no instructions on how to make said daughter like or wear said frock).
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• A long way from penny Apples

  July 16, 2008 @ 3:02 pm | by Conor Pope

  Gweilo in Dublin is a self-confessed Apple nut (well, not nut, perhaps, but she’s a fan of their stuff). She’s done a small price survey on the cost of Apples here and elsewhere and, you’ll not be surprised to learn, we don’t fare very well.

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• A Lidl piece of news

  @ 9:48 am | by Conor Pope

  Jack Fagan has what might be proof that the recession is really starting to bite with the news that the overpriced Habitat store near the bottom of Dublin’s Grafton Street could soon be replaced by a Lidl discount supermarket. Apparently the discounter is going head to head with an overseas bank for the lease of the massive store in the country’s most fashionable (and most expensive) shopping area.

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• Lose the force

  July 14, 2008 @ 11:11 pm | by Conor Pope

  A friend of mine was travelling to Dublin via Heathrow with her two kids yesterday. When checking in, staff, with a straight face, told the children that their plastic light sabres would not be allowed on board the plane because they posed a security risk. While I would quite like to live in a world where light sabres did pose some sort of risk (to bad people, obviously) I’m not so keen on one in which adults with apparently responsible jobs in airports think it is perfectly reasonable to force six-year-olds to dispose of incredibly flimsy plastic swords for reasons which are completely beyond reason.

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• Don’t count your chickens

  @ 11:26 am | by Conor Pope

  After returning his car late one evening to a Spanish airport in what he thought was pristine condition, a Pricewatch reader who contacted us recently was surprised when a member of staff took the keys and crawled under the car with a torch. There was a dent under the car, a dent which would cost him serveral hundred euro.

  He was mystified as to how she knew exactly where to check for damage and was deeply suspicious that the damage had been done before he’d taken possession of the car. His insistence that he was not responsible for the dent fell on deaf ears and, because he had already signed a form agreeing to cover any damage, there was very little he could do to stop the money being debited from his credit card account.
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• ‘Buy your own cup of tea’

  July 11, 2008 @ 11:37 am | by Conor Pope

  . . . or should that be let them eat cake? Speaking on Morning Ireland this morning, Michael Antoinette O’Leary described as “bizarre” the idea that airlines would give delayed passengers the comfort of a cup of tea while they waited to find out what was going on with their flights. Apparently Ryanair passengers don’t deserve it because they only paid €40 for their tickets (not including taxes, charges, baggae fees and “handling charges”, presumeably). Leaving aside common decency and respect for your customers, what about the people who pay a couple of hundred euro for their tickets, Michael? Do they deserve a cup of tea?

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• And it’s lashing rain too

  July 9, 2008 @ 5:14 pm | by Conor Pope

  Nightmare in Dublin Airport today. Nearly all flights in and out have been cancelled because of a malfunctioning radar system. I’ve just been speaking to a colleague who was out at the airport and apparently there are a lot of very, very unhappy would-be passengers who’ve been left stranded in hellish sounding clues with little or no information being provided by the affected airlines. Quelle surprise!

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• Free fruit for kids

  @ 1:53 pm | by Conor Pope

  I had to look very hard but eventually I found an upbeat news story in the paper this morning. The European Commission has proposed spending €90 million a year giving free fruit and vegetables to schoolchildren across the EU. That sounds like a fine idea to me - anything that gets kids eating more good stuff is to be welcomed. But without wanting to sound like a 103-year-old curmudgeon, how does the Commission propose we wean them off games consoles and television and have them run around outside for a bit as it is the absence of any real exercise, combined with junk food, that is leading to spiralling rates of childhood obesity.

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• Irish Times politics blog

  July 8, 2008 @ 12:06 pm | by Conor Pope

  We have another new blog on the block this afternoon. The Irish Times politics blog will feature contributions from many of our political staff including Deaglán de Breadun, Mark Hennessy and Harry McGee. Deaglán’s been first out of the blocks this morning.

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• Petrolling Prices

  July 7, 2008 @ 9:10 pm | by Conor Pope

  Rosemary wants a petrolwatch wesbite. She’s heard that somewhere in Dublin there is unleaded petrol to be had for 128 cent but hasn’t been able to find it. “In the name of competition and survival, we should be helping each other out! A nice wad of information about where’s cheapest would help and, perhaps (I’m being optimistic) help drive down prices elsewhere. And if not on Pricewatch, where?!” I’ve just found somewhere else that is doing just that and also found out where petrol is selling for 128 cent a litre. It’s in Donaghmede, apparently.

  I like the idea of people helping each other out and pointing the way to bargains. But let’s not confine it to petrol – wouldn’t it be great to have a constantly updated, entirely independent website where you could go to find out where the cheapest and dearest everything was? Yes, yes it would.

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• What the Dell is going on here?

  @ 5:26 pm | by Conor Pope

  A reader contacted us last week after experiencing some very poor customer service from Dell Computers. She gives training and development courses so needs a laptop and projector to do her job. In April she ordered a new Dell Vostro laptop and specified that she wanted Microsoft’s XP software, as opposed to Vista.

  “A laptop arrived within four days, but it had Vista on it,” she writes. She phoned the company and was told to try it out and see how she got on. She did and phoned again a couple of days later asking for a laptop with XP - as she had ordered. She received it within five days and was told Dell would organise collection of the unwanted computer the following week.
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• Ambushed by adverts

  @ 5:17 pm | by Conor Pope

  Towards the end of last month, Pricewatch unknowingly walked through a Bluetooth hotspot on Dublin’s Wicklow St and caught a glimpse of an unsettling and unpleasant future. Our phone beeped and before we knew what was happening we were watching a 19-second advert for UPC - the company spawned by the marriage of NTL and Chorus.

  As part of a new multi-million euro multimedia campaign, UPC has been trialling a comparatively new form of advertising known as “proximity marketing”. It takes advantage of Bluetooth, a short-range wireless system for transmitting data, to target phones that come within range of small base stations. UPC has set up 10 such stations in locations across Dublin and, for weeks now, has been indiscriminately broadcasting adverts to any device it can reach.
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• Have your say on labels

  July 3, 2008 @ 12:43 pm | by Conor Pope

  The Food Safety Authority of Ireland is holding a national food labelling public consultation and wants consumers and “interested parties” (that’d be manufacturers, then) to have their say. Most informed consumer groups favour a traffic light system, which see food high in calories, salt, sugar and fat stamped with a red light while more wholesome option would have a green light. Manufacturers horrified by the thought of having to put a big red danger symbol on their packaging disagree and say a gentler Guideline Daily Allowance system is better. To bolster their argument they point to cheese which is high in fat but is actually good for people in moderation.

  Whatever the EU eventually goes for will be an improvement in this country. Food labelling in Ireland is absolutely woeful and there is an urgent need to radically overhaul the system so that it is of some value to consumers. The labelling system as it stands in Ireland is neither mandatory nor clear cut. For a start, working out how much salt you’re eating is almost completely impossible and is made even more difficult by manufacturers listing the sodium rather than the salt content in their products. To calculate how much salt that equals, consumers have to multiply the sodium level by 2.5 and then multiply or divide that number by the number of grams they have consumed. Hardly advanced maths, granted, but still an equation which is unlikely to be done by many time-pressed, mathematically challenged shoppers.

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• Biofuel policy delayed over food prices

  @ 11:52 am | by Conor Pope

  It looks like energy minister Eammon Ryan might be having something of an epiphany with regard to bio-fuels. Harry McGee reports in the paper today that his department has delayed the publication of a policy outline on renewable energy because of concerns about the impact growing food for fuel will have on world food prices.

  According to the minister’s spokeswoman the “delay is due to information coming to light and our fuller understanding of the impact of biofuels on food prices and the developing world.” Hmm. Concerns about first generation biofuels are hardly new and I would have thought Eamnon Ryan would have long since factored them into his thinking.
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• Outside-in is up and running

  July 2, 2008 @ 1:34 pm | by Conor Pope

  A big welcome to Bryan Mukandi who joined our little blogging world yesterday.

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• Things I didn’t know when I woke up

  July 1, 2008 @ 11:30 am | by Conor Pope

  Some interesting stats released by the good folk at the Central Statistics Office appear in Gloriously Free Rebranded Paper this morning. There were Poles living in every town and city in the country on April 23rd 2006 and their average age was 27, some 9 per cent of the people of Kinsale were British, Germans don’t like Longford and Monaghan and an impressive 17 per cent of the Lithuanians aged from 5 to 19 can speak Irish.

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