Pricewatch »

• Post no bills

  April 30, 2009 @ 12:18 pm | by Conor Pope

  Times are tough and money is scarce so why are all these wannabe politicians who are vying to win seats in the local and European elections wasting so much of it on ridiculous and ridiculously glossy fliers and leaflets which go straight from most people’s letterboxes into their recycling bins? In my constituency, there will also be a byelection on the same day which means I’m getting totally useless leaflets on the treble. I can’t imagine any circumstances under which my voting intentions would be influenced by a shameless puff piece.. All told, the bill for these elections will run into the tens of millions and a spend of that magnitude is indefensible when things are so tight everywhere else.

• Just what we need

  April 27, 2009 @ 2:22 pm | by Conor Pope

  And there we were, thinking things were pretty bad, what with the near collapse of global capitalism, the death of the Celtic Tiger, the bursting of the property bubble, pay cuts and tax hikes, when the threat of a flu pandemic suddenly loomed terrifyingly large and made the other problems seem that little bit smaller. As I write, the virus looks to have travelled from Mexico, to the US, New Zealand, France, Spain (confirmed) and Hong Kong. While we’re being reassured by the authorities here that all will be well and that it has a plan, I’d be just a smidgen concerned as to how a system which can’t seem to provide its citizens with adequate health care when all is well with the world, would respond to a full blown health crisis. I’m also wishing I’d not watched this programme a couple of months ago. Of course, maybe a bit of perspective is in order.

  6.20pm Update: Two people in Scotland confirmed as having contracted swine flu

• Has music had its day?

  @ 11:34 am | by Conor Pope

  NINE DAYS AGO the second international Record Store Day came and went, largely unnoticed apart from in a handful of independent music shops where small crowds gathered to hear local artists including Paul Noonan, Jape and Lisa Hannigan play.

  The musicians were lending their support to a day aimed at highlighting the enormous challenges threatening the very existence of shops which have formed such an integral part of many people’s lives for generations.

  Of all the many upheavals wrought by the internet revolution over the last 15 years, the shake-up in the world of music has been amongst the most profound. The consequences of free music downloads could end up destroying not just the shops which used to sell records but an entire industry.
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• Phoning it in

  April 24, 2009 @ 1:16 pm | by Conor Pope

  There was a story that used to do the rounds in the little city I grew up in back in the 1980s about a psychic who cancelled an appointment with a student who’d come to see her as soon as she arrived at the door of the, er, practice? Instead of reading her tea leaves or whatever, the fortune teller just handed the student a letter and told her to read it when she got home. The student never made it home as she was hit by a car and killed en route. When the family opened the envelope, it contained a single page which was blank save for the words ‘you have no future.

  This (ahem, possibly apocryphal) tale impressed me greatly when I was young and impressionable. Now I find myself wondering if the psychic was driving the car? Or, if not, could she have at least been done for complicity in a crime. I’ve also lost what little faith I had in psychics.

  I have to confess to a particular disregard for phone psychics – the idea that someone would pay over €2 a minute to have their fortune told over the phone by some random person claiming to have some class of gift baffles me. This is a roundabout way of highlighting this story in today’s paper about a deal reached between Regtel and Realm Communications in connection with the latter’s premium rate services, which includes Irish Psychics Live. Under the agreement, some customers of the service will be refunded, Realm will adopt the Regtel code of conduct and it has agreed to pay the costs incurred by regulator.

  I’m sure the company saw it coming though.

  Boom boom.

• Shopping as it should be?

  @ 9:42 am | by Conor Pope

  
  Nuff said.

• An end to one rip off

  April 23, 2009 @ 12:35 pm | by Conor Pope

  Mobile phone roaming charges have been one of the great rip offs of our age and it’s nice to see the EU being so proactive in bringing the operators to heel. (If it always had such an easily identifiable consumer friendly agenda, the Lison Treaty would have been passed in a landslide). In recent years it has forced operators doing business across Europe to dramatically lower their call charges and they are set to fall again in July after the European Parliament approved new measures capping the amount mobile operators can charge. The biggest change will be in the area of data transfer and prices for sending e-mails or web browsing while roaming will be capped at €1 per megabyte. That will fall by a further 50 cent per megabyte by 2011 – that’s 20 times less than some Irish operators currently charge. A call ceiling of 43 cent a minute for outgoing calls and 19 cent a minute for incoming calls is also to be introduced in July and that will fall further – to 35 cent a minute for outgoing calls and 11 cent for incoming calls by 2011. Go EU!

• Green bread

  @ 12:29 pm | by Conor Pope

  Pat The Baker’s going green for the next six weeks to promote climate change messages and ways people can lower their carbon number in conjunction with the people at change.ie. It has launched a €5,000 Bread Lottery which sees a lottery token replace the heel at one end of its half pans of bread. In addition to the lottery number there will be one key environmental message – which is great except for the fact that I’m quite partial to the heels.

• Not even trying, part 7

  @ 10:50 am | by Conor Pope

  I have a soft spot for emails from the widows or daughters of deposed sub-Saharan dictators with suitcases filled with diamonds which they want me to have in return for nothing at all. I also like correspondence from shadowy lawyers in the same region who say they have plucked my name at random from a “register of good persons” because I sound like a person who’d like to offer my bank account as a home for the vast fortune of a man who died intestate of some terrible affliction.

  What I don’t like are emails like the one I received this morning.

  Greetings!!! You have a bank draft of $780,000.00 USD, which await the outstanding payment of $275USD.Contact the TNT courier company for claims with your information. Contact person Mr. West Oduduwa,Email: tntcours***nl.rogers.com.

  No tragedy. No ridiculously convoluted story, nothing at all to suggest they’ve put any effort in to the mail.

  Sometimes I think these 419 scammers hearts’ aren’t in their jobs any more.

• Every little helps, a lot

  April 21, 2009 @ 10:53 am | by Conor Pope

  Tesco, the largest retailer in Ireland – and one of the biggest in the world – posted a 10 per cent rise in its annual profit to a staggering £3.128 billion this morning. As usual, the shop did not break out the figures for its Irish division and instead included them as part of its international business arm. Now I am sure there is a perfectly innocent reason why Tesco is reluctant to say how much money it makes in the Republic as opposed to the North, it’s just that I have no idea what it might be. Every time I have asked them, they’ve declined to answer. All they would say is that their Irish operations reported a solid performance, what ever that means.

• Cutting the cord

  April 20, 2009 @ 9:41 am | by Conor Pope

  Are telephone lines really necessary in an age when there are substantially more mobile phones than people in the country and a range of broadband services which deliver high speed internet access for a lot less than traditional providers can offer?

  A fixed telephone will cost even the most casual user around €500 a year, over half of which goes on line rental alone. Add a fairly run-of-the-mill broadband package and the cost will jump to closer to €1,000 a year.

  It is hardly any surprise that a growing number, particularly those in their 20s and 30s, with hundreds of bundled minutes and free calls from their mobile providers, have decided to disconnect their landlines.

  Despite deregulation of the telecom sector and the presence of dozens of telephone providers here, Eircom remains the dominant player in the sector, not least because it still owns the infrastructure which the other operators must piggy-back on, with very few exceptions.
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• Are we really booze-hounds?

  April 15, 2009 @ 8:54 pm | by Conor Pope

  According to a new study almost one in three Irish adults admits to binge drinking at least once a week. That suggests to me there is either a serious problem with alcohol in this country * or a serious problem with how we define binge drinking. The medical profession will have us believe it is six “standard drinks” in a single session which means anyone who has three pints on a night out or three large glasses of wine with a meal is on a binge which seems just a little ridiculous to me. Of course maybe I’m in denial…
  
  *(Just to be clear, there is undoubtedly a serious problem with alcohol in this country)

• Finally, amazon will take our cash

  April 12, 2009 @ 7:44 pm | by Conor Pope

  My definition of shortly and Amazon’s are, I’ve just realised, very, very different. Way back in 2006 – ah remember 2006, we’d so little to be complaining about back then – I reported how the online retailer had irritatingly stopped shipping electrical goods to customers in the Republic. When I contacted amazon.co.uk at the time I was told it had cut us adrift because of problems implementing the Waste Electronic and Electrical Equipment (WEEE) directive, whereby retailers and producers have to take in old electronic equipment when new equipment is sold. “We are still talking to the Government about how best to implement the directive,” a spokesman told me. “While the discussions are ongoing we have ceased shipping to the Republic he said, adding that Amazon hoped to be able to resume selling electronic goods here “shortly”.

  Shortly finally arrived last week when the company signed up to the directive and resumed shipping electronics and a whole bunch of other stuff to Irish customers. The company will now take back old electrical equipment on a like-for-like basis, free of charge in one of four recycling centres in Dublin, Cork, Galway and Kilkenny. A restriction on goods weighing over 30 kg is still in place and things like mobile phones and light-bulbs remain out of bounds for Irish customers but it’s still news to be welcomed although whether we have any money left to be shopping on amazon.co.uk is very much in doubt.

• Wait a minute, we’re supposed to haggle

  April 9, 2009 @ 11:30 am | by Conor Pope

  
  Haggling is a skill that takes practice. The first time I tried it, I have to say, I was pretty terrible. It was in a Tunisian souk 15 years ago. I wanted a wooden salad bowl which was priced at around a tenner.

  “Five euro,” I said confidently.

  “No, a tenner” the stall holder responded, just a a bit more confidently.

  “”Er, six euro?” Slightly less confident this time.

  “A tenner.”

  I should have walked away at this point but I persisted. “Seven?

  “Ten.”

  “Eight?”

  “Okay, nine,” he said, obviously feeling sorry for me. I left, clutching my bowl, embarrassed by my uselessness.

  Another time, in a huge Bangkok market, I found a leather camera bag that would have been perfect. Just fecking perfect. The seller wanted the equivalent of €12 – a song, I thought. I decided to beat him down still further and offered five. He refused to budge so I walked away. Six years on I still regret not buying it as I’ve never seen its like again. And all the poor fella wanted for it was 12 measly quid.

  Sigh.

  Anyhoos, a report published today by consumer magazine Which?, says that while most people are reluctant to haggle it’s worth giving it a whirl as in these hard times, businesses are more likely to come down in price just to make the sale. The report showed that almost three quarters of its members said that they hadn’t tried haggling on the high street over the last year, but 85 per cent of those who had given it a go were successful. A third of shoppers questioned felt that high street stores just wouldn’t agree to lowering prices while a fifth felt too nervous to try haggling.

  Anyone got any good haggling stories?

• Shock as ad found to be not entirely true

  April 8, 2009 @ 1:39 pm | by Conor Pope

  The ad on your right, for some brand of pomegranate juice that I had never heard of until today, has just been banned by the British Advertising Standards Authority because it is apparently “misleading”. What? An ad that’s misleading? Surely there’s some mistake? Apparently 23 very literal minded people complained to the authority that the company had exaggerated the health benefits of the juice by suggesting it would help them live forever when that might not actually be the case. For its part, the company argued that it was not implying its product would bestow immortality and said that the exaggeration was deliberate and not intended to be taken literally. The story has already been picked up by nearly all the broadsheet and tabloid newspapers in the UK giving the company a degree of publicity that they could scarcely have dreamed possible when this rather dull poster was first conceived, which is, I would imagine, exactly the result the ASA would have hoped not to achieve.

• A loss of innocence?

  April 7, 2009 @ 2:30 pm | by Conor Pope

  I’ve always had a soft spot for Innocent Smoothies. Quite apart from the high quality of the product, I liked the company’s back story – it was set up ten years ago by three mates who bought £500 worth of fruit, and made smoothies to sell at a small London music festival. So when I heard today that it has just sold a £30m 20 per cent stake to Coca Cola, it left me feeling a little glum. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’ve no real problem with Coke, even if its Dasani brand of bottled water was shown to come directly from the delicious London public water supply a couple of years ago. It is, however, inevitably going to completely swallow the Innocent brand despite what its three founders are saying today and it’s always sad to see the good guys going over to the dark side.

• H20 in the 02

  April 6, 2009 @ 11:51 am | by Conor Pope

  I went to Cirque du Soleil in the Poi.. sorry, 02 on Saturday (quick review – clown: very funny; gymnasts: amazing but not enough death-defying stunts, frankly; modern dance interludes: long and spirit crushing). Was dismayed to see that while the building might be new, the shameless rip-offs are wearily familiar. Six quid for a pint of lager in a plastic cup was bad enough but it was the €3 that I was asked to pay for a 500ml bottle of Deep River Rock still water that really took the biscuit (which itself cost more than a euro). Three euro. For a bottle of water! Sheesh. I’ve just had a look in Tesco and it’s selling 500ml bottles of own brand still water for 30 cent a pop while Superquinn is selling bottles of Deep River Rock (in case that brand is important to you, and it really shouldn’t be) for 71 cent. That’s more than four times cheaper than the water in the 02, for shame. The tickets were pretty pricey too, although they were a Christmas present so I can’t complain about that.

• Smoothie way to health?

  @ 10:39 am | by Conor Pope

  IN AN IRONY as delicious as any smoothie, there appeared to be confusion in the Safefood camp last week over a survey it published recently focusing on consumer confusion over the nutritional benefits of the fruit-filled drinks.
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• Another blogger on our site

  April 3, 2009 @ 11:25 am | by Conor Pope

  That’s two in a week so it is. The new arrival is Ciara O’Brien and she’ll be mainly talking about technology, I suspect.