Pricewatch »

• The e-book club

  October 7, 2008 @ 11:07 am | by Conor Pope

  BOOKS HAVE ALWAYS been remarkably resilient at staying the advances of technology and are largely unchanged since Don Quixote first tilted at windmills nearly 400 years ago. While music has hopped from cylinders to vinyl to cassettes to CDs to a collection of ones and zeros stored on your computer’s hard drive, the book has always been just so.

  Until now. The technology behind electronic books has improved dramatically in recent years, and the e-book has entered the mainstream, which could – if the digital music experience of the last decade is anything to go by – see book prices fall as ease of access rises.

  “The question is, can you improve upon something as highly evolved and well-suited to its task as the book? And if so, how?” asked Amazon.com’s chief executive Jeff Bezos last year as he launched his company’s Kindle e-book. It has taken the US by storm and, with its wireless access to thousands of low-cost downloadable books and newspapers (including The Irish Times ) as well as its web browser, it is, Bezos claims, well equipped to see off “the last bastion of analog”.
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• The year of living cheaply

  September 29, 2008 @ 1:24 pm | by Conor Pope

  Kath Kelly doesn’t sound daft, but after reading her recently published adventures in extreme saving it’s hard to escape the notion that there isn’t a side to her that is very slightly bonkers.

  One evening in June 2006, the 47-year-old from Bristol was out with some friends and, as the wine flowed expensively, the conversation turned to how skint they all were. As a part-time English language teacher earning little more than £10,000 a year, Kelly was probably the poorest of her peers and spent much of the drunken evening moaning about how difficult it was going to be to afford a nice wedding present for her soon-to-be-married brother.

  It was while slightly maudlin and slightly drunk that she had a notion which would change her life. She decided that, rather than scrimp and save a little bit and buy the couple some nice towels or a Le Creuset casserole dish as most sane people would have done, she would live on just a £1 (€1.26) a day – excluding rent and utilities – for a whole year and use the money she saved to buy them something really special.

  So she did, and she’s just published a book documenting her experiences. How I Lived A Year on Just a Pound a Day has touched a chord in the UK where it has been flying off the shelves since the beginning of the month as the global economy stumbles and people look for tips on getting by on less.
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• Shopping bags at dawn

  August 12, 2008 @ 10:42 pm | by Conor Pope

  The recent spat between two of the country’s biggest supermarkets has been very public, very bad-tempered and very expensive. Over the past fortnight Tesco and Lidl have been paying big money to tear strips off each other in newspaper ads and on billboards, with claims and counter claims going back and forth about the quality and value of the products they’re offering.

  Last month, Tesco, perhaps unwittingly, started the mud-slinging by launching what it described as a €100 million price-cutting campaign aimed at stopping its customers switching to the discount retailers Aldi and Lidl. The campaign saw 1,000 products bundled together under a “Cash Saver” range and the retail giant making a promise that its prices wouldn’t “be beaten by anyone”. It also warned its rivals that it would do whatever it felt was needed to keep its word.

  The move was prompted, in part at least, by repeated National Consumer Agency (NCA) surveys which showed that the discounters were between 20 per cent and 50 per cent cheaper than the more established retailers. Separate studies from the NCA showed that, because of the increasingly wide price gaps, consumers had started modifying their shopping habits in search of better value.
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• Warning: may contain guff

  July 28, 2008 @ 2:28 pm | by Conor Pope

  There was a time when the only the makers of certain shampoos and moisturisers could get away making absolutely ridiculous claims about their products. In recent years, however, more and more manufacturers have climbed on board the crazy train and now if you take a walk through your local supermarket, you will quickly lose count of the number of foods that promise to keep you alive and gorgeous looking for longer.

  There are sugary cereal bars which use extra nutrients and calcium to distract from their calorific content, vegetable spreads that promise to lower your cholesterol in a heart beat and yoghurt drinks with unpronounceable additives which, the ads say, will improve you digestion and immunity. And because these products are even better than real food — as the manufacturers will have you believe — they can justify charging a premium for them. It’s a win win situation, for them at any rate.
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• Recycling the good old days

  July 21, 2008 @ 10:42 am | by Conor Pope

  ‘Knickers renewed – one good pair from two old pairs; here’s how to manage it,” begins one snappy article from a collection of pamphlets originally published by the British government during the second World War and which have recently appeared in book form.

  The trick, apparently, is to cut a new gusset from the back of one pair and neatly sew it into place on the other pair and off you go, good as new.

  Make Do and Mend contains dozens of original facsimile leaflets offering hundreds of tips on how to make everything from carpets and gloves to saucepans and blinds last a whole lot longer. There are details on how to darn deftly and instructions on how best to convert a tired pair of men’s pyjamas into a reinvigorated summer frock for your daughter (although there are no instructions on how to make said daughter like or wear said frock).
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• Ambushed by adverts

  July 7, 2008 @ 5:17 pm | by Conor Pope

  Towards the end of last month, Pricewatch unknowingly walked through a Bluetooth hotspot on Dublin’s Wicklow St and caught a glimpse of an unsettling and unpleasant future. Our phone beeped and before we knew what was happening we were watching a 19-second advert for UPC – the company spawned by the marriage of NTL and Chorus.

  As part of a new multi-million euro multimedia campaign, UPC has been trialling a comparatively new form of advertising known as “proximity marketing”. It takes advantage of Bluetooth, a short-range wireless system for transmitting data, to target phones that come within range of small base stations. UPC has set up 10 such stations in locations across Dublin and, for weeks now, has been indiscriminately broadcasting adverts to any device it can reach.
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• Pet hates about prices

  June 23, 2008 @ 10:06 am | by Conor Pope

  It used to be that when your family pet got seriously ill, dangerously cranky or just plain old 20 years ago the only realistic option was to “send it to a farm in the country”. Times have changed, however, and dramatic advances in animal medicine have made it possible to treat many animal ailments that used to spell curtains.

  Instead of a swift boot, today’s overly aggressive mutt might be offered behaviourist therapy at a cost of €150 per session. A dog’s orthopaedic surgery following a car crash will set you back €1,500 while an elderly Fido is just as likely to be offered an MRI scan followed by a hip replacement, cataract surgery and an extensive course of expensive antibiotics at a combined cost of several thousand euro before the “farm” option is even discussed.
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