Retailers the main winners with festive gift vouchers

Amid the icicle lights and strains of Slade, harried parents scour the toyshop aisles, hunting down the last Roboreptile in the State, pausing only briefly to throw a Cyberman mask into their trolley and place their orders for a Nintendo Wii console.

Irish consumers will be the biggest spenders in Europe this Christmas, with the average household expected to spend €1,339 during the holiday period, according to Deloitte's annual consumer survey.

But in the festive splurge, are consumers' rights getting lost in the crowd? The humble gift voucher - the present of choice for everyone not blessed with the innate ability to second guess the tastes of others - is rapidly becoming the latest consumer bugbear, the National Consumer Agency (NCA) said this week.

Battle-weary shoppers are inundating the NCA's consumer helpline with complaints about gift voucher expiry dates and questions about what their rights are when the retailer goes out of business before they have redeemed their voucher.

The NCA has surveyed 70 retailers and found that more than one-third - 37 per cent - have expiry dates, ranging from six months to five years. "It is vital that consumers check to see when the expiry date applies, as they have no redress if it expires before they choose to use it," says Ann Fitzgerald, the executive chairwoman of the NCA and the director of consumer affairs.

The NCA found wide discrepancies between retailers' policies, ranging from a written policy printed on the voucher to no policy whatsoever. "It should not be assumed that just because the voucher does not state an expiry date, the store would allow it to be redeemed at any future date."

The gift voucher market is estimated to be worth around €330 million a year - about 1 per cent of total Irish retail sales, according to the Gift Voucher Shop.

As a certain proportion of vouchers are never redeemed, it is also a lucrative business for retailers. According to the Deloitte survey, 58 per cent of Irish consumers intend to give give gift vouchers as presents this year, while 48 per cent of people actually want to receive them.

A consumer who holds a voucher for a retailer that has since gone out of business would become an unsecured creditor and would have to make a claim to the liquidator, while if a retailer was to refuse to honour a voucher with no specified expiry date, the consumer could take the case to the Small Claims Court.

Fitzgerald is campaigning for the Small Claims Court to become a more accessible and popular way for consumers to resolve disputes with retailers without having to use a solicitor.

The application fee for the service, which is provided at local District Court offices, is €15.

The odds are good. Last year, 2,114 of the 2,697 cases handled by the service - 78 per cent - were either settled through negotiation by the small claims registrar or won by the consumer.

Earlier this year, the NCA welcomed the decision to increase the limit in the awards it can make from €1,269 to €2,000. It now hopes that the limits will be increased further.

Fitzgerald is pleased that the Small Claims Court is piloting an online application process, that allows consumers in 16 towns to monitor the process of their claim online using a PIN.

The NCA is also urging consumers not to throw out their receipts with their wrapping paper. Shops are entitled to proof of purchase, but this doesn't have to be the shop receipt. A relevant credit card or debit statement should suffice.

With online shopping increasingly in vogue for queue-phobic consumers, the NCA's current campaign centres on consumer rights under the EU's distance selling rules. But basic rights following face-to-face transactions are still a source of contention.

Shoppers are often shocked to discover that they are not entitled to a refund or exchange if they simply suffer a bad case of buyers' remorse or are on the receiving end of a rubbish gift. Retailers are not obliged by law to care too deeply if three people bought you a copy of Jamie Oliver's latest cookbook.

The confusion arises because many shops will allow an exchange or refund on unwanted goods as a gesture of goodwill and the most forward-thinking of retailers provide special gift receipts that do not state the price of the item.

Some shops will also go beyond basic statutory rights by exchanging unwanted presents without a receipt as long as the store's tags or labels are intact.

However, consumers are entitled to refunds when the goods are faulty or not as described and retailers' signs that there will be no refunds permitted during the busy post-Christmas sales period are illegal, Fitzgerald adds.

In this situation, the phrase "your statutory rights are not affected" is a meaningless sop.

More information is available from the NCA's website at www.consumerconnect.ie, or at 1890 432 432.