Natty new sterling/euro site
Conor Pope
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.
1:20 pm
Conor, I’ve often wondered why the state doesn’t require that the major supermarkets allow read access to their internal pricing systems and then facilitate private efforts to create sites that let you compare your weekly shopping before leaving the house. We require pubs, restaurants and such like to display their prices outside the premises so we can know before we enter.
I proposed the same in late 2003 in the lead up to local elections back when Mary Harney was telling people to ’shop around’ but the idea was “a seed that could find no purchase” as Holly Hunter might say. For most families driving from one shopping centre to another just be able to compare prices on a Saturday is not a option. We have Kelkoo and the like for electrics and beyond but nothing for groceries.
Comment by Dan Sullivan