Price cuts at Tesco

Carol Loscher from Wicklow was in Tesco where she noticed items 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."

IRISH RAIL REFUNDS:Mark Bohan was impressed recently when he came across an example of Irish Rail using social networks to drum up new business. The company was offering a 50 per cent discount to its Facebook friends and their friends. "Unfortunately, I did not spot the offer until an hour after I had booked my tickets for the Christmas period online for my wife and myself," he writes.

No worries, he thought, as he sent an e-mail to Irish Rail with a view to cancelling the original booking. He then made a new booking, availing of "the very generous offer above. Now here's the rub: I got a phone call from Irish Rail last week confirming cancellation of the first booking but saying I would only receive an 80 per cent refund."

He says he was "quoted lots of stuff about 'terms and conditions' as regards online booking, which nobody ever reads! This episode has taken the good out of the whole offer, and left me down €37.60 as a result of a cancellation fee."

He wants to know more about these fees, whether they have any basis in consumer legislation and if it's at the discretion of the vendor to refund any fee at all?

"You will probably get the same stonewall I got, but as everybody knows, newspaper articles can have a strange way of getting things done in this country, especially in companies where a critical comment in The Irish Times can prove very motivational to executives!"

While we're unsure we have such an affect we gave Irish Rail a call. A spokesman pointed out, unlike many travel companies, it does offer refunds on cancelled tickets and he said that the refund ceiling of 80 per cent of the value of the ticket is stated in the terms and conditions - which it is, we checked.