FOR MANY YEARS we’ve been complaining about rising prices, but this year the coin flipped and we entered a long deflationary spiral. While the near collapse of global capitalism, the death of the Celtic Tiger, the bursting of the property bubble, pay cuts and tax hikes have left us feeling understandably glum, we can find some crumbs of comfort in the cheapening of the country.
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Somebody sent me some dirt in the mail today. Yay! While other people in this building are getting lovely presents – bottles of wine, amazon boxes and the like – delivered to their desks, I’m getting letters like this (and I’m quoting it in full):
“SURELY someone should take ALDI and the Irish producer to task for ADDING a heap of dirt to the potatoes before packing them.
It’s a real nuisance when using them in the kitchen and all of it ends up going down the sink and adding to the material in the drain pipes.
Quite simply it detracts from the quality of the product.”
Quite.
The anonymous letter writer has thoughtfully included a sample bag of Aldi potatoes, empty save for the offending dirt.
Happy Christmas.
WITH THE number of sleeps until Christmas rapidly diminishing, it’s hardly surprising that over the next 72 hours thousands of stressed-out shoppers will fall back on gift vouchers to sort out their most pressing stocking-filling dilemmas.
While they’re just a step up from cold hard cash – the one gift most people are extremely reluctant to give at Christmas time – they do serve as an ideal last-minute present and one which will be greeted with a broader smile than some ill-advised talcum-powder-aftershave combo found gathering dust in your local pharmacy or a pair of absolutely hilarious socks featuring Homer Simpson saying “D’oh!”.
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I wonder if people are still joining gyms or are they one of those “luxuries” that have been knocked on the head as a result of this little depression we’ve been having? Up until quite recently, I used to belong to a very, very fancy gym with enormous chandeliers and a huge chaise longue in the lobby and gold tiles on the steam room walls (oh, and some fitness equipment too) but I decided to knock it on the head because I couldn’t justify the expense. They’ve been texting me for months now pleading with me to re-join and with each message I ignore, the price of membership seems to fall further. If I hang on long enough they’ll be paying me to join. I wonder do these fancy clubs have a future or all they all going to go the way of the Celtic Tiger?
Gap in Dublin have apparently introduced a charge of one euro to wrap presents? Why on earth would they do that? They’ll make peanuts from it and annoy absolutely everyone.
A reader got in touch last week to give out about Tesco. She was doing her shopping there earlier this month when she noticed a whole pile of products which had been recently reduced. “These included the usual items with 50 per cent off or buy-one-get-one-free offers,” she says. Included in this special offer aisle she saw blocks of President Emmental Cheese with “price cut” on the tag. “Being a lover of cheese and fond of a bargain I looked a little closer. The reduced price was €3.09 for a 250g block of cheese. However, on further examination and to my complete amazement, the previous price of this item was a whopping €3.10. A massive reduction of €0.01, equating to a saving of 0.3 per cent. Thanks Tesco for another amazing price cut.”
Another reader got in touch over the pricing of Krackawheat. Up til recently he was paying €1.07 a pack. When he went into Tesco in Dún Laoghaire in October the price was €1.99. He says: “As if almost doubling the price wasn’t bad enough, Tesco had the gall to say on the shelf that this price was a reduction from €2.39. “Unbelievable! Their ‘price cuts forever’ campaign lasted about two months.” Tesco says “a keying error” caused “some confusion in the price of this product” – the price should be €1.09 and is “being corrected”.
There’s worse. Lil – who can be found blogging here – sent me a mail this morning after coming a “special offer” on Surf washing liquid. Previously it cost €8.19 but is now selling at a special price of €9.50 which Tesco claims is a “saving of €2.19″.
Hmmm…. As Lil says, the retailer is either deliberately trying to con people or it has a “faulty and unreliable computer system which can’t calculate”.
Either way, it shows that it pays to be vigilant – every little helps, after all.
Despite the fact that many of us have mixed feelings about turkey – just count how often you’ll hear (or say) “I don’t really like it, it’s very dry” over the next couple of weeks – it’ll still be eaten by 94 per cent of Irish people in the days ahead, with all but the most resolute toeing the Christmas party line.
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Ah the joys of the Internet.
Ben Dunne’s online wheeze, has become the place for all sorts of japery over the last 24 hours with people posting a range of bogus products for sale.
You have this Prime Dublin 2 development property.
And these golf clubs for sale.
There’s more – the twitter hash tag if you want to find them is #bendumb
Just back from week off – In Vegas don’t you know. I lost my shirt, thanks for asking.
Anyhoos, I was glad to read in today’s main Pricewatch feature (actually, I didn’t just read it, I wrote it too) that we’ll all be spending a lot less this Christmas so I’ll have an excuse to buy lumps of coal as presents this year. The reigning in of the rampant consumerism is no bad thing, according to psychologist Mark Harrold it’ll be good for us.
Speaking of spending less, there are four pictures of me wearing increasingly ridiculous hats in the current issue of the RTE Guide, all to promote the (shameless plug alert) Living Lightly Christmas Special which is on next Tuesday at 7pm.
I also review Christmas biscuits on the page today with the unfortunately named Rover biscuits finishing well off the pace – that didn’t stop my colleagues polishing them off with gusto while I was away last week, incidentally. The hounds.
