Pricewatch

• Don’t pay the fireman…

  May 20, 2009 @ 12:44 pm | by Conor Pope

  A listener to the Ray Darcy show contacted me last week with a problem which is just bonkers. Two months ago she was in a small car accident with another car. No one was injured but at the scene she called 999 – as you do - and requested the gardai and an ambulance. The fire brigade also came out and she thought nothing of it. Until last week when she got a bill from the county council for a fire tender. And how much was she being charged? €1,117. She rang and explained that she didn’t call the fire brigade and nor were they required but was told it was procedure for them to scramble when 999 was called. She was also told her bill was a little bit more expensive because the accident happened on a Saturday so the firemen were on double time.
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• Shocking holy costs

  May 18, 2009 @ 12:10 pm | by Conor Pope

  LAST MONDAY morning there was a parade of young girls posing for photographs in Dublin’s Mountjoy Square. As the first warm sun of summer bounced off their dazzlingly white parasols, the little girls did little twirls and their proud parents beamed and snapped away at digital cameras.

  Fast forward seven days and it is a racing certainty that the parasols have joined the dresses, shoes and all the other accessories in cupboards where they will attract no further attention, except perhaps from the moths who will feast on them in the years to come.

  While dressing a child up at enormous expense like a mini-bride may seem like one of the first of the Celtic Tiger excesses to go in the current climate, as this year’s Communion season draws to a close, reports suggest quite the contrary.
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• Farmers protest at Tesco

  May 15, 2009 @ 9:45 pm | by Conor Pope

  Around 100 farmers stormed a Tesco outlet in Navan this evening, filled trolleys to the brim with groceries, locked them together and used them to block the aisles in protest at the food price reductions rolled out by the store last week. It sounds like a novel demonstration and the farmers may well have a point but I’d have to question the timing. If they wanted to get themselves substantial coverage either on TV or in print, 9pm on a Friday is not really the best time to stage a protest. And having worked in a supermarket stacking shelves on a Friday evening, I feel awful sorry for the people working their tonight who’ll have to clean up the mess.

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• Them green shoots are mighty small

  @ 12:20 pm | by Conor Pope

  I got a bit of lift yesterday when I overhead a conversation in a lift suggesting that the ESRI was due to publish an “optimistic” report in which it would predict that the economy was going to grow “quite rapidly”.

  Wayhay!!! I thought, there’s life in that Celtic Tiger yet. Then I read the reports this morning and was just a bit miffed to learn that me and my lift source have entirely different definitions of optimistic.

  According to the ESRI if everything goes swimmingly in the global economy (and there’s absolutely no guarantee that will happen) and we all accept pay cuts and take more savage budget measures on the chin, then we just might see some class of bounce by 2015.

  That’s six years away.

  Sigh.

  Still, it could be worse. I could be Brian Cowen.

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• It’s war baby!

  May 14, 2009 @ 12:50 pm | by Conor Pope

  Say what you like about the Supermarket Wars, they are bringing down prices all over the shop. And all those full page ads that have been popping up in the paper are a bit of a boost too!

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• More annoying Ryanair fees

  @ 11:17 am | by Conor Pope

  The actual seats might be cheap but some of the add-on charges associated with flying Ryanair take the biscuit (that’ll be €2). Yesterday it issued a press release announcing that people who book flights from May 20th will have to check in online before arriving at the airport, which is grand.

  Sort of.

  Up until now, folk who used Ryanair’s airport check-in desks were charged €10 while those who checked-in online did not pay anything – presumably because there was little or not costs associated with online check-in. Well, now there is. The tenner charge has been scrapped (Yay!) but has been replaced by a fee of €5 fee per person, per flight irrespective of how they check in.

  And printer’s ink must be at a premium at the low fair airline because it is also introducing a new penalty of €40 for re-issuing boarding cards that has already been printed.

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• Battle of the bowl

  May 11, 2009 @ 11:24 pm | by Conor Pope

  THE UK’S long-running sugar wars were reignited towards the end of last month when the almost universally respected consumer magazine Which? published one of its infrequent reports into the state of the breakfast cereal market and again found most of the big name brands wanting.

  The report, titled “Going Against the Grain”, found the sugar levels in many cereals reviewed to be “shockingly high”, and it described as “particularly worrying” the fact that so many high-sugar cereals were still being marketed to children. It said a number of adult cereals, including Special K and Bran Flakes, are dressed up as healthy alternatives but actually contain more sugar than a bowl of chocolate fudge ice-cream, which is quite a distance from how the svelte, wholesome characters in the advertising campaigns represent them.

  The manufacturers, who are no strangers to such charges, had their responses ready in a heartbeat. The consumer body’s study was effectively rubbished as the big brands pushed the line that their breakfast cereals were wholesome and entirely unconnected to the growing levels of childhood and adult obesity in Britain.
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• Watch out! He’s got water

  May 6, 2009 @ 5:13 pm | by Conor Pope

  Aaaaargh!!! First The Man says we can only bring tiny amounts of liquids through airport security check-points because of some ill-defined threat. The move forces us to dump perfectly good bottles of water in rubbish bags and buy expensive replacements on the other side. We also have to carry our 100 ml bottles through security in tiny little baggies. Now the Dublin Airport Authority want us to pay a euro a pop for the little plastic bags.

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• Consumers getting raw deal for years

  @ 4:51 pm | by Conor Pope

  The Tesco executives who gathered at one of the retailer’s large stores outside Drogheda yesterday morning could have been forgiven for silently cursing the curmudgeonly reaction of the assembled journalists to what had been billed as the biggest shake-up in the Irish grocery sector for more than a generation.

  It quickly became clear that Tesco Ireland chief executive Tony Keohane and the media weren’t on the same page when it came to discussing the impact its major stock restructuring will have. He wanted to talk about the savings shoppers in 11 northeastern towns will enjoy but the questions focused on what brands will be available and the shake-up’s effect on suppliers, producers and ultimately, jobs.

  While these are legitimate questions, and ones which have yet to be adequately answered, the news that Tesco has cut the price of 12,500 goods in the affected stores by an average of 22 per cent will be welcomed by the thousands of shoppers from the Republic who routinely spend hundreds of millions of euro in cheaper Northern supermarkets.
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• Predicting profits

  May 4, 2009 @ 8:00 pm | by Conor Pope

  ARE “psychics” who perform telephone readings genuine mystics taking advantage of technology to bring their gift to a wider audience or charlatans taking advantage of the gullible with high-priced but worthless yarns?

  For most, the answer may be blindingly obvious, but that doesn’t stop many apparently rational people blowing irrational sums on having their fortunes told in such a fashion by “psychics” who are, if Pricewatch’s sole experience is any reflection, as insightful as an ironing board.
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• Many Irish brands to disappear

  May 1, 2009 @ 11:18 pm | by Conor Pope

  DOZENS OF grocery brands which are popular in the Republic will start disappearing from the shelves of Tesco stores from Tuesday as the retail giant launches a major restructuring of its stock. Industry sources say many familiar brands will be removed from stores close to the Border and in at least one new store in Cork from next week as Tesco seeks to more closely mirror the product offerings and prices available in its British stores.
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