Readers Queries

Tesco Prices:Brian Kelly contacted us about Tesco.

“You probably get a good deal of correspondence on Ireland’s biggest grocer, but this is a good one,” he says. “I buy Krackawheat on a regular basis and I have been paying €1.07 a pack up to now.” When he went into Tesco in Dún Laoghaire recently 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”.

Book Tokens

A reader recently went to the Wise Owl bookshop in the Ballinteer Shopping Centre in Dublin to buy school books for her two children. “My total expenditure for books for the new school year was just under €250,” she writes.

She happened to have €40 worth of National Book Tokens which she offered towards the payment. “I was told that they could not accept book tokens in payment for school books. Since when has a school book not been a book?” she asks.

We contacted the store and a spokeswoman confirmed that, generally speaking, book vouchers could not be redeemed against school books. She said profit margins on school books were considerably lower than on regular books – less than half, in fact – and pointed out that the margin would be eroded even further were book vouchers used in the transaction.

She said that unlike many shops, it did accept book tokens for cut-price bargain books and said that, to clear up any confusion, the store would put a sign up explaining to shoppers that they could not accept book vouchers for school books.

Cafe Pricing

Brian Lougheed from Killarney dislikes the growing practice in Irish cafés of having a two-tier pricing system where you are charged more for eating a bun on their premises than if you take it home.

In Tasmania recently, however, he met a new “rip off”, which has yet to make it to this side of the world.

He says that in Hobart he found a 4 per cent surtax on his bill because staff had to be paid more on a bank holiday.

“It might be better not to publish this bit of info, it might be copied here,” he concludes. Too late.

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