You may have seen this already, but if you haven’t stop what you’re doing immediately and read it now. It’s possibly the best complaint letter I’ve ever read. It made me laugh. Out loud. In a very quiet office. People are still looking at me strangely.
Is Valentine’s Day a romantic day for lovers or a day when people lose the run of themselves entirely and allow card makers and restaurant owners and florists and supermarkets and chocolatiers and off-licences to relentlessly and ruthlessly exploit them? Whatever your view, it certainly costs a packet – If you’re going to be all traditional about it then expect to have little change out of €300 by the time midnight on February 14th comes round – a dozen red roses delivered to your sweetheart’s home will cost in the region of €100. A card will set you back a fiver and a bottle of champagne is another €40. Then there’s the romantic candle lit dinner (when you’re shoe-horned into a restaurant and served the “special menu” (the only special thing about it is the price) and the taxi home taking the total cost of proving your love for another year to over €300.
Is it money well spent or a total scam?
Ignore that last post we’re all doomed. Today’s breaking news index page is spectacularly depressing. First Active is being shut down and 750 people will lose their jobs there and in Ulster Bank. Fine Gael’s enterprising Leo Varadkar is warning thousands of other jobs will also go in the financial sector. Talks on how to reduce exchequer spending by €2 billion are continuing but are shrouded in pessimism. The Icelandic government has collapsed (what’s the difference between Iceland and Ireland? A single letter and six months, according to the, er, hilarious, folk who move in Europe’s financial circles). The interestingly named but ultimately disappointing Land of Leather is closing the doors of its four Irish shops for the last time and even cheapy shoe shop Barratts is suffering and is now in administration.
And it’s only fecking Monday. The country’s statues will be on the move again before the end of the week. . .
EVERY EVENING George Lee does his turn on the RTÉ news, the nation’s hearts collectively sink. While his reports on the dreadful state of the Irish economy are generally right on the money, they are gloomy enough to make the most upbeat of souls sob into their cut-price oven chips. No one could deny that we are in a dire state, but, amidst all the incredibly depressing news about the state of our finances, there are reasons to be cheerful. Here are just some of them.
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Big news of the morning is that Ikea has announced the opening date for its Dublin store. It’s July 27th, which leaves plenty of time for the flatpack hysteria to build. Should I care? Is Ikea that brilliant? I hate to admit it but I’ve never been in one.
So, the really, really big news of the week is that Ultravox have reformed and are playing the Olympia in March.
I know, I know – how exciting is that!
The only blemish on this otherwise gloriously bright spot of news is the price of the tickets. €60!
60 quid – a ridiculous price to pay to hear a band that have one – at a pinch two – songs that anyone has ever heard of.
In fact I am willing to wager ** €100 than no-one reading this can name four Ultravox songs without resorting to the Web.
** not really.
BUDGET COOK BOOKS will be big this year. The Frugal Cook, The Kitchen Revolution and (the gloriously titled) How to Feed Your Whole Family a Healthy, Balanced Diet with Very Little Money and Hardly Any Time, Even If You Have a Tiny Kitchen, Only Three Saucepans (One With an Ill-fitting Lid) and No Fancy Gadgets – Unless You Count the Garlic Crusher are just three of the big-selling cookery books currently attracting interest from cash conscious consumers who like to eat good food.
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Before Christmas, like many people Jamie Lawerence started wondering what the price differences between the Republic and the UK were once the currency differentials and VAT were taken out of the equation. Unlike most of us, he had the techy know-how to work it out and build a website around it. “A bit of work later and I launched dualpricing.ie which lets the user enter a UK and Irish price and it calculates the actual price difference after excluding the differences in currencies and VAT,” he writes. “The website also keeps track of the average price differences for each store and records the best and worst performers” and is, in my opinion well worth a visit.
James McKenna got in touch in the wake of the recent price increases on some of the State’s toll roads. The excuse given for the 10 cent price hike was the Vat increase of 0.5 per cent which was announced in the budget, but McKenna points out that the 0.5 per cent increase equates to less than 2 cent on the cost of the toll. “No doubt the excuse for this increase is that the machines will not accept coins below 10 cent,” he writes. “If Vat had come down, could we expect the toll to be reduced at the same rate (ie 10 cent for every 0.5 per cent decrease in the rate). It’s very doubtful!”
A salutary lesson in connection with gift vouchers from a reader in Dublin. She bought a €50 gift voucher from Topshop in Blanchardstown just before Christmas as a birthday present for her 19-year-old sister and assumed that the they could be used in Topshop’s retail outlet in Cork city where her sister lives.
It wasn’t to be. When the sister went to use the voucher in Cork she was told that it didn’t accept vouchers as the shop was a concession store within Debenhams and only Debenhams gift cards were acceptable.
“I gave my sister €50 and on my return to Dublin I went to Blanchardstown to return the voucher. The sales assistant went to speak to a manager and returned after about five minutes to say that they couldn’t offer me a refund on the voucher and as I didn’t have a receipt there was nothing they could do.
“I e-mailed the customer service department for Arcadia Group, the owners of Topshop on 30th December and received an automated reply to say I would receive a response to my query within 24 hours, but I haven’t heard anything since.”
We had a look at the terms and conditions on the vouchers in question and they do state that the card cannot be used in Topshop concessions in third-party department stores, although, to be fair to our reader, she could hardly have known that before she bought the vouchers. We also contacted the company to see if there was anything it could do for her but we’re still waiting to hear back from them.
WHILE THE sometimes ridiculous differential between euro and sterling prices in retail outlets operating in the Republic and the UK have frequently attracted the anger of readers over the last several years, the volume of complaints increased significantly as the new year dawned and the two currencies almost converged.
With some stores in Northern Ireland offering one-for-one in the run-up to Christmas, even the most arithmetically challenged consumer was able to work out instantly that the numbers on the price tags did not tally with the realities on the foreign exchange markets.
Readers queued up to complain to Pricewatch last week about what they saw as greedy profiteering, and few stores were spared their wrath. One man happened upon a four-pack of socks selling in Dunnes Stores with price tag of €4. It looked like a fair price until he noticed that they cost just £2 (€2.13) in the sterling zone. “Is that a record?” he asked.
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Is anyone surprised to learn that Dubliners pay an average of 4.5 per cent more for stuff than their country cousins. According to the latest price comparison by the Central Statistics Office (CSO) when it comes to certain goods and services, the gaps are a lot more severe than that . Hair cuts, bacon and booze all cost way more in Dublin than they do elsewhere.
The most startling statistic is that Dublin men have to pay 50 per cent more for a wash, cut and blow dry than their provincial counterparts, for example, and almost 30 per cent more for a dry cut. And Women leaving in Dublin are being asked for 25 per cent more for a wash, cut and blow dry than country women.
Back rashers cost over 37 per cent more in Dublin compared to the rest of the State but weirdly ham fillet is 14 per cent cheaper in the capital. Now I’m not sure how useful any of this information actually is to anyone – the CSO study goes into remarkable detail and on a certain level you’d have to wonder why they bother. Particularly as we are all left wondering why hair cuts cost so much more in Dubiln or why mushrooms are 10 per cent dearer in Dublin but it is a quite interesting a bi-annual treat for price trainspotters like me.
It won’t come as much of a surprise to anyone who has ever had a pint in a Dublin pub to learn that it is here where the big gaps are to be found across the widest range of products. A pint of draught lager is 12.5 per cent dearer in Dublin, draught cider costs 11 per cent more while draught stout is just under 10 per cent more expensive. A small bottle of wine is 6.5 per cent dearer. Overall, drink in Dublin pubs is, on average, a smidgen over 9 per cent dearer than outside the city. Drink sold in off-licences is broadly the same price everywhere.
Going to the cinema costs about 10 per cent more in Dublin than in other cities or towns.
A reader was in Dunnes Stores this week when he saw a packet of socks selling for a reasonable looking €4. Then he noticed the sterling price – £2. He wants to know if it is a record? Hardly. In fact, such price differentials are becoming commonplace.
Another reader found a coat in M&S this week with a sterling price of £99. There was no euro price but he reckoned it would be around €120 (he was allowing an exchange rate of 0.85 – quite generous on his part as the actual rate is now closer to 98 cent). He took the coat to the till and was asked to pay €150 . A manager told him that as the coat had been bought in some months ago it had to be sold at the stg/euro rate at which it was bought. What a ridiculous response – has the rate ever been as low as 0.66p. Sensibly our reader walked away.
And another, originally from Northern Ireland but living in Dublin, found a Canon 450d camera selling in Con’s Cameras in Dublin for €634. It cost £385 (€404) in Belfast.
A fourth wants to know that as sterling reaches parity with the euro, what is happening to the price of magazines that originate in the UK. He points out taht there appears to have been little or no downward move in prices since the the two currencies started to converge more than a year ago. One magazine he looked at earlier this week had a sterling price of £3.99, and a euro priced of €6.50.
And a Galwegian living in Fermanagh noted the huge differential in price of the chemical Sodium hypochlorite used by DIY folk to kill moss on concrete drives and paths. A container of 25 litres costs £11.73 in Fermanagh while a 20 litre bottle in Cavan costs €32.50, that’s a difference of over 200 per cent.
