Pricewatch

• It’s your own fault

  June 30, 2009 @ 11:21 am | by Conor Pope

  Busy day today. We have Tesco rolling out its price cutting campaign in the Capital (a mystery celebrity is going to help them at their midday launch but their press people have steadfastly refused to tell me who it is - I’m beside myself with excitement. Who might it be!!! Afternoon update: It was Gerry Ryan - am gutted)

  It’s not all good news for the retailer monster as it has also been forced to defend itself against charges that it has already upped the price of dozens of the products it claimed were permanently lowered less than two months ago.

  And then there is the publication of the Competition Authority’s much anticipated report aimed at getting to the bottom of the sometimes shocking price differentials that exist north and south of the border. after months and months of beavering away behind the scenes it turns out it’s all our own fault. Well, that’s not strictly speaking true, the Government is also asked to shoulder some of the responsibility while higher overheads also contribute to the higher costs, but mostly it’s down to us. The one group who is in no way to blame for the sometimes huge price differentials - no siree bob - are the retailers. They are, the Authority tells us, completely blameless and shame on all of us who thought otherwise.

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• What to do?

  June 28, 2009 @ 11:10 pm | by Conor Pope

  What do you do if you’re served food in a restaurant which, when it comes, turns out to be pretty horrible?

  A) Eat it and tell the waiter everything was fine?
  B) Push it round the plate to create the impression that you ate it and tell the waiter that everything was fine?
  C) Don’t eat it and snarl at the waiter before paying for the meal and leaving just less than ten per cent as a tip?
  D) Complain and refuse to pay for the meal?
  E) Complain, refuse to pay for the meal and demand compensation for being served inedible slop?

  The reason I ask is that recently I was in a well regarded restaurant where I ordered a fish dish which the place was well known for – a cod and chorizo cazuela as it happens. The meal came and the cod was inedible – mushy, cold and absolutely vile. I’d name the restaurant only I have no proof that the cod was mushy, cold and absolutely vile so they’d probably take me to the cleaners in the High Court for slandering them. Anyways, for only the second time in my life I called over the waiter and asked him to take it back.

  He was mildly apologetic and said he would talk to the chef - I can just imagine how that conversation went: ‘There’s some bollix out there who doesn’t like your food. Will we spit on his dessert?’ And that was the end of it. When I called for the bill a little while later he told me, with the demeanour of a cat who’s just left a present of a rat on my kitchen floor, that he’d taken the cod off the bill. ‘Well, that’s very good of you,’ I thought, ‘seeing as how I only had two disgusting mouthfuls of it’.

  So I paid for the rest of the meal – which was not, it has to be said, particularly good – and left feeling just a bit hard done by – and hungry. Very, very hungry.

  How should a restaurant react to a complaint like this? Do the bare minimum and take the offending meal off the bill? Throw in complimentary desserts or coffees or glasses of wine? Tear up the bill, completely? And what should I have expected of them? I’m not sure but I am absolutely certain that the restaurant’s response was so poor that I will never darken its doors again.

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• Better value at Supervalu

  June 25, 2009 @ 4:30 pm | by Conor Pope

  Another front in the supermarket prices wars has been opened after Supervalu rolled out €86m worth of fresh price reductions. It takes to €200m, the number of price cuts the store says have been implemented since the beginning of the year.
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• Hmmmm. . . tinned sausages

  @ 3:38 pm | by Conor Pope

  Tesco today recalled its cans of Value Beans and Sausage after pieces of plastic were found in a number of cans although I would have thought the plastic could only have been an improvement on what is, by most definitions a pretty dodgy product. Actually, while I might turn my nose up at low price sausages in a tin now, there was a time - and I’m not proud to admit this - when I absolutely loved them and I had more than one hissy fit in our local supermarket when my mammy refused to buy them. To be fair to me I was, only 17.

  Er, 7, I meant to say 7.

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• Red-letter day for ESB customers

  June 22, 2009 @ 10:15 am | by Conor Pope

  Lasy week I featured a story from a person who received a threatening solicitor’s letter from the ESB about his last month’s payment after he switched from the ESB to Bord Gáis Energy.

  An ESB spokeswoman said that the letter was sent out “inadvertently” as a result of a glitch in the system and she denied that such an approach was common practice.

  It turns out he was not the only one to get legal missives from the ESB, as our readers were quick to point out. A reader called Holly “was sent a similarly threatening letter demanding payment of €11.93 (for a bill which I never received)”. She says that “failure to comply within seven days would have led to a debt collector being sent to pick up the tab – and I only received the letter eight days after it was dated. I am ever so glad that ESB has finally let my account go to Bord Gáis, after three months of waiting for us to be switched over. To hell with them.”
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• It’s not a gas at all

  June 17, 2009 @ 8:49 pm | by Conor Pope

  I spent weeks earlier this year advising anyone who asked me – and quite a few who didn’t – to make the switch from the ESB to Bord Gais and when I was asked what the catch was I insisted there was absolutely none – switch and save, I said. That was of course before I knew that by switching we were effectively handing over our bank details to a bunch of halfwits who would store them all on a single laptop which they wouldn’t bother encrypting.

  The computer was thieved earlier this month - of course it was - and now 75,000 of us will have to monitor our bank accounts for Lord knows how long to keep an eye out for suspicious transactions. The office of the data protection commissioner has warned that fraudsters could potentially use information taken from this laptop to withdraw money from accounts or take out loans in their name. “The risk may be low but there is a risk,” deputy data protection commissioner Gary Davis said.

  On our breaking news service today Conor Lally says Bord Gáis is to write to its customers tomorrow and has started contacting the main banks to inform them how many of their customer’s details are on the non encrypted stolen machine.

  The managing director of Bord Gais Energy, Dave Bunworth said he “deeply regretted” the theft of a machine that was not encrypted. “We have had an aggressive system of encrypting since last July and this computer should have been encrypted before it was given to the staff member; it was a flaw in the system.”

  As I said, halfwits.

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• Every little helps

  @ 11:14 am | by Conor Pope

  Here’s the story I had in the paper today about M&S:

  MARKS AND Spencer is to significantly reduce the prices of all its clothes, homeware and furniture in the Republic from tomorrow but has stopped short of introducing its “permanent price cuts” in its food halls.

  The British retailer says it is dropping prices in the affected departments by an average of 12 per cent in response to the economic downturn and continuing consumer concerns about the price discrepancies which exist between M&S outlets in the Republic and in the UK.

  Dubbed “We’ve listened, we’ve lowered”, the price-cutting campaign is the latest salvo in a retailer price war which started last month when Tesco Ireland announced a major stock restructuring and price reductions averaging 22 per cent.
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• Meatless

  June 15, 2009 @ 11:21 am | by Conor Pope

  Put down that breakfast roll, it’s Meat Free Monday.
  
  Meat Free what now? The new initiative is being heavily pushed this morning by the world’s most famous vegan Paul McCartney. He is trying to convince people to go without meat for just one day every week in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the world’s livestock.

  While the amount of ‘celebs’ who have rallied around the cause is mildly irksome (Kelly Osbourne take a bow ) – the campaign does have a point (assuming of course you’re wealthy enough to be able to afford the luxury of choice). Meat is responsible for around 18 per cent of the planet’s greenhouse gas emissions and huge tracts of the Amazonian rainforest are cleared every year to make space for cattle ranches and feed.

  And quite apart from environmental concerns, the idea makes perfect sense from a health and wealth perspective too. Vegetarian food can be cooked for half nothing while people who eat less meat tend to be thinner than those who stuff themselves with steaks and burgers and sausages and the like every day of their lives. And with that I’m off to Cornucopia for me lunch.

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• Restaurant death watch

  June 13, 2009 @ 3:05 pm | by Conor Pope

  Another couple of restaurants in Dublin appear to be on the verge of closure today with the Town Bar and Grill and Eden joining Tante Zoe’s in the queue for Crisis Corner this week. While none have gone the way of Mint and Rhodes and actually shut their doors for good yet, the owners appear to be pretty gloomy about their survival prospects. It is a great shame as I have had nice meals in all three over the last ten years.

  There will be a whole lot more very high profile casualties before the recession finally bottoms out – I’d name a few I reckon will go only I’d be afraid of getting crushed under the weight of the solicitors letters - but I really hope the places that have consistently provided good food at comparatively low prices such as L’Gueleton and the Winding Stair (and Gruel with its lovely sausages and mash…. hmmmmmmm sausages * drool *) will survive as, if nothing else, they will give all the failed restaurateurs who got away with charging inflated prices for average food during the Celtic Tiger years, a template from which to operate in the future.

  Maybe we shoudl compile a list of the best value restaurants in the country that we want to see survive come what may? Anyone got any suggestions?

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• Wrong turn costs a lotta Luas change

  June 8, 2009 @ 8:00 am | by Conor Pope

  An unfortunate series of events left Doireann Murray substantially out of pocket last month. It started when she parked in what was described as an overflow car park adjacent to the Stillorgan Luas stop.

  When she went to pay for the day’s parking, she realised she had left her wallet at home. She rang Q-Park, the company in charge of the Luas car parks, to explain the situation and to ask if she could pay the following day. “I have done this on a few occasions in the past and it has never been a problem,” she says. “The man I was talking to was very helpful and said it would be no problem at all. He asked where exactly I was parked, took my registration and told me to leave a note on the windscreen and he would ring the guy in charge of the car park and tell him to look out for the note.”

  She did as she was told and, the next day, when she went to pay for her parking on the way to work, she was less than pleased to discover her car had been clamped. She rang Q-Park who said they would ring the clamper straight away. “A few minutes later the guy in charge of the clamping rang me and said that he had just been down to the car park and there were no cars in the clamping log. He asked me to repeat my reg number and again he said the car wasn’t there.”
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• I’m back

  June 5, 2009 @ 5:21 pm | by Conor Pope

  Just back from my holidays in Nice, which was nice. The only downside was that having taken them so early, I now have nothing to look forward to for the rest of the summer, which is just a bit depressing, almost as depressing, in fact, as arriving in Dublin Airport where, as usual, everything seemed chaotic and miserable and decidedly claustrophobic.

  While I was away I had to have a couple of stitches removed from the head of a small child – a long and traumatic story. I was told by a rep at the (gl)ampsite where we were staying that the best thing to do would be go to the A&E unit of the local hospital where we would be seen to in a matter of minutes.

  “I can’t do that, it’s not an emergency,” I said and the rep suggested we go to a private clinic adjacent to the hospital and pay to have the stitches removed. So that is what we did – we arrived for a midday appointment five minutes early, and were seen straight away. And how much did it cost ?

  Seven. Euro.

  I was sure that something had been lost in translation and I was being asked to pay €70 but no, €7 was all the doctor wanted. I pay nearly ten times that at home so my GP can tell me that that I have an unspecified virus “that should clear up in a week or so” – a diagnosis that is up there with “he’s just not himself” when it comes to helpfulness.

  And while I’m on the topic of things that are better in other places, Carrefour is a much, much nicer supermarket than anything we have in Ireland and a whole lot cheaper too. Recently I reviewed chocolate desserts and gave five stars to Rians Le Fondant au Chocolat which cost €3.75 in Fallon & Byrne. While it seems like a fairly exclusive brand in this country, it is all over the place in and, at the risk of repeating myself, how much did it cost?

  €1.65 or less than half the price in Dublin’s posh delis.

  Mind you one thing that cost a whole lot more was internet access. I would have blogged from there but the campsite wanted me to pay a tenner an hour to access the web, a price which was completely outlandish by any reckoning.

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