We've Got Mail: Graeme Thornton has contacted us about the price of blackcurrant cordials in bars and nightclubs. "As someone who doesn't want to get completely drunk every time I go to the pub, it's nice to get a pint of blackcurrant cordial and still have a good night out," he writes.
The problem is the variation in the price. "It is a drink that doesn't cost very much. You can buy a litre of it undiluted for about €3 in the shop," he writes. This means, he says, that a supermarket-bought bottle will make about 25 litres of the diluted drink.
Why then, Thornton asks, do the Dublin nightclubs charge up to €4 for a pint? "I have never come across this kind of charge outside Dublin. When he inquired at one nightclub he was told by the manager that a pint has two dashes of cordial at €1.80 a dash.
"In bars the price ranges from free to €1.50 for the same pint. The price range is ridiculous and you never know how much you are going to get charged and then when they charge you the €4 you feel completely ripped off. It doubly stings when a lot of the time I act as designated driver and bring my friends to the pub or nightclub. If you ask me, the bars and nightclubs in Dublin are complete rip-off artists. There can be no defence against these kinds of margins."
Thornton is absolutely right. If a €3 bottle of blackcurrant cordial makes 25 litres (or approximately 50 pints), a nightclub can make around €200 from its €3 investment, an immoral mark-up by any definition. We spoke to one publican who said that while charging €4 for a pint of cordial was way too much, he believed a price of €1 or €1.50 was certainly justifiable. He pointed out that many nightclubs and pubs had paid large sums of money for their licences and could not sustain a situation whereby people were sitting around with free drinks in front of them. He said a balance had to be found and said that nightclubs who charged inflated sums risked completely alienating some of their customers.
The penalty for online rugby
Last week we highlighted the €3 booking fee tha applies to every ticket bought via the Leinster Rugby website. While we can understand the need for some class of administrative fee for online bookings, attaching €3 to each ticket - no matter how many are bought - seems excessive. When we contacted the club, a spokesman defended the per-ticket charge and said that Leinster had decided to follow a similarly questionable model adopted by the IRFU and Ticketmaster.
He went on to say that Leinster had not considered the possibility of people buying multiple tickets and that the club would look into the possibility of introducing a ceiling on the per-ticket charge.
The item prompted another reader to get in touch.
After buying six tickets for last season's game against Toulouse, Stuart Findlay was charged an €18 booking fee. He complained in writing to the club and was told that the €3 per ticket charge was to cover admin costs, facility fees, banking and postal charges. "For the branch to claim that multiple ticket charges had not been considered is ludicrous," he writes. "In fact none of the reasons quoted justify a per ticket charge rather than a per transaction charge and admin costs are reduced for multiple ticket sales as only a single tear is required for many tickets."
Kitchen paper trails
PriceWatch reader Deirdre Daly was disappointed that our recent kitchen towel survey did not consider whether the products were manufactured from recycled paper. "Surely . . . this should be a consideration in purchasing a particular brand," she rightly writes. She goes on to say that Inversoft, which is made in Ireland and is widely available, uses recycled paper in its products. "I am not connected in any way with the company - just an interested consumer," she says.
