LEADING BRITISH retailer Halfords charges an average of 28 per cent more for goods in Ireland than the UK, according to a new survey.
Some 98 per cent of the products surveyed on the company’s Irish website were more expensive than in the UK, the survey by Prof Barry Smyth of UCD found.
Halfords operates 22 stores in the Republic, selling car accessories, bikes and other leisure equipment, mainly in out-of-town locations. Prof Smyth, by using software to extract data from the company’s Irish and British websites, compared the prices of almost 3,500 products listed on both sites.
The largest price difference he found was €89, for a child’s mountain bike costing €224.99 in Ireland but €135.56 on the UK web-site.
Some product categories were uniformly more expensive – bicycle helmets, for example, cost nearly 50 per cent more in Ireland. Halfords says the prices it charges in different countries are affected by factors such as exchange rate fluctuations, transport costs, staff pay, taxes and local market conditions. However, Prof Smyth says when he adjusted prices to take account of lower VAT rates in the UK, the differential was still over 21 per cent.
An earlier comparison of prices at Argos revealed a 24 per cent difference between Ireland and the UK, while at Ikea it was 8 per cent.