We've Got Mail: Once more substantial differences between the cost in sterling and euro on price tags for clothes in shops with outlets in Ireland and Britain has angered readers. First up is a Co Clare reader who was shopping for a pair of sparkly party tights in Dublin recently.
"I know, I know, tights are not the most exciting things in the world, but women do buy a lot of them and for parties there is nothing like black-and-silver lurex-thread tights," she writes.
Apparently they are hard to find, so she was thrilled to see just such a pair in Accessorize on Grafton Street, Dublin. Her joy was short lived and lasted only as long as it took her to examine the price tag.
"The sterling price was £8 and the euro price was an unforgivable €17," she writes. Using last week's exchange rates, £8 is €11.93. "Even given the British chains whingeing guff about taxes and VAT and all that nonsense, that is a huge mark-up - 50 per cent! Are they doing this on all their products?" she asks.
"I didn't buy them, needless to say. I reckoned I'd buy them when next in London."
It so happened that a trip came up some days later so she popped into an Accessorize outlet in London where exactly the same tights had the same sterling price tag of £8 but a euro price of just €12.50. "How they ended up costing €17 in Dublin I have no idea," she writes.
So we tried to find out by contacting the company's head office in the UK but no one was available for comment.
Another reader, Kate McDonald, was shopping on the same street when she noticed a similar - although not quite so drastic - discrepancy between the euro and sterling prices. She bought a coat from Laura Ashley at a cost of €150.
"When I got home I noticed that the sterling price on the label was £85 (€127). It had been blacked out. Why is the exchange rate for this item more than the current bank exchange rate?"
Penalty for €3 ticket fee?
Exchange rates and a questionable booking policy have angered another reader. Stephen Fraser from Sandyford, Co Dublin has been in touch to highlight an anomaly when it came to buying tickets for a Heineken Cup pool game between Leinster and Edinburgh at the end of the month.
He is travelling over to the Scottish capital with a group of 13 other people to watch the game and had intended buying all the tickets through the Leinster website so he and his pals could sit with the other away supporters.
"I was surprised to see that the £15 tickets were being sold by the Leinster branch for €23 plus a €3 booking fee (per ticket)," he writes.
He has calculated that with £15 equalling €22.38, according to last week's exchange rates, Leinster are making approximately €3.70 on each ticket, "meaning that for my 13 tickets I have to pay an extra €48!
"Since the game is on in Murrayfield, and unlikely to be a sellout, I will be buying my ticket at the gate," he concludes.
We contacted the Leinster branch of the IRFU to ask how it could justify adding a €3 booking fee to each ticket. A spokesman said that it had been decided to follow the model adopted by the IRFU and Ticketmaster.
He said that the per-ticket fee was used to cover the cost of postage and administration.
When it was pointed out that the €40 our reader was being asked to pay for his tickets would cover a lot of stamps, the spokesman said the people buying multiple-tickets was something that he had not considered and said Leinster would look into the possibility of introducing a ceiling on the per-ticket charge to reduce the ridiculous sums being charged to people in a similar position to our reader.
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