Richard Fennell is fond of the occasional can of Tuborg lager, which comes from Denmark. Or at least it used to. He bought a couple of cans in his local Tesco recently and was having a drink with his Danish girlfriend when they noticed something wasn’t quite right with their beer. The girlfriend - using a word that Pricewatch is going to adopt immediately - complained that the beer had been “bewatered” or diluted. “When disposing of my can in the recycle bin I noticed the alcohol content had been reduced, but the price had not,” writes Fennell. “On further investigation I saw that it was brewed in Ireland,” he continues.
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Halloween costumes haven’t even been worn yet and the season to be jolly has already started. With each passing year, the pop group Wizzard’s wish that “it could be Christmas every day” comes worryingly closer and Irish retailers are playing their part by pushing festive stock on shoppers as early as the first week of September. By the end of this week, Do They Know It’s Christmas? and Stop the Cavalry will be on maximum rotation in Irish shops, and cash registers will be singing loudly as another season of frenzied Christmas consumption gets underway.
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Children as young as 10 have been found working in slave-like conditions in a textile factory which produces clothes that appear destined for Gap. The Observer carries the story in which the children describe threats and beatings and long hours of unwaged work. ‘We firmly believe that under no circumstances is it acceptable for children to produce or work on garments. These allegations are deeply upsetting and . . . a full investigation is under way,’ Gap said in a statement.

Ireland €310,000
The US €276,000
Britain €267,500
Germany €261,500
Switzerland €256,000

The Taoiseach earns more than any of the leaders of the top 30 OECD countries following last week’s 38 grand pay hike The Norwegian PM earns just €130,000 for managing the affairs of a nation with a population broadly similar to Ireland’s.

The National Consumer Agency wants consumers and organisations to submit their views on the building trade for a study it
has commissioned entitled ‘The Home Construction Industry and the Consumer in Ireland’. As part of the research, the Agency is inviting comments and submissions on aspects of purchasing a home, home construction, maintenance and renovation. It sent it the press release below. (more…)

Finally! After weeks of reviewing vinegars and tinned tomatoes and various kitchen implements I get to try something nice! I felt just a little poorly after all the gorging, mind you.
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Sophia Purcell from Rathmines describes herself as an ardent magazine reader who spends large amounts of cash on glossies every month. She is wearily accustomed to the dubious prices charged here for British magazines and has read “the many excuses offered on your page and have accepted them to a degree”. But a recent savage hike in the price of OK magazine has prompted her to get in touch.
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ph: Geoff Caddick/PA WireWhat’s the deal with exorbitant prices?

From handling charges to baggage charges and confusing price tags to inflated drug costs, big business is increasingly savvy at extracting money from Irish consumers - here are 10 of our least favourite ways they do it, in no particular order . . .
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MCD has coughed up compo to most of the good folk who suffered through the mudfest that was the Barbara Streisand concert in Castletown House in July, it has been confirmed. Around 2,500 people were due some class of compensation because of the chaos at the concert. Of course not everyone has been mollifiied and there are a “number of Streisand fans who say they are unhappy at the level of compensation being offered” according to this morning’s Irish Times (sub required). Some ticket-holders are planning to go to the Small Claims Court and a, presumeably pretty fed up, MCD spokesman insisted it had done everything possible to address the problems.

Petrol prices are on the way up, according to ireland.com’s breaking news. Apparently petrol has already risen 11.7 cent a litre since the beginning of the year which would cost the average motorist an extra €210 a year and with oil prices nearing €90 a barrel this week, the news is not looking good for car owners

This week I reviewed tinned tomatoes ranging in price from 26 cent to €1.60. With such a price differential I expected their to be a huge difference in taste too. But there wasn’t. Given that the tomatoes are likely to end up as part of a big sauce, it really doesn’t seem worth it to me to splash out on a tin. I’d also love to know who’s behind the Tesco Value packaging – could they make it any more unappealing looking. It’s like the bad old days of yellow packs, only with a distinctly Stalinist bent to it.
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John Dundon from Tipperary was driving from Limerick to Cork recently when he noticed something which struck him as puzzling. “For as long as I can remember there has been a price differential between unleaded petrol and diesel fuel and the advantage in diesel’s favour has typically been in the order of five to 10 cent per litre.”

Not any more. He says that in recent days he has seen the price difference virtually evaporate, and now diesel costs just one cent less than petrol. “Is this just another shame-faced attempt to maximise profit margins by the fuel companies or forecourt owners, or does this reflect another change of which I haven’t been aware?”
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Kieran O’Hare from Drogheda got in touch with a complaint about Harvey Norman. He and his girlfriend were in the market for six leather dining chairs, and a set on display in the aforementioned shop caught their eye.

“As there was no mention of what material the chair covers were made of I asked the salesman if the chairs were leather and he said they were,” he writes. Delighted to have found what they were looking for so quickly and at a price they considered reasonable the couple put down a deposit and left.

A couple of days later our reader was looking at the Harvey Norman receipt when he noticed, much to his dismay, that it described his chairs as “faux leather”. As he most certainly did not want fake, faux or imitation leather he rang the store and asked to speak to the chap who had sold him the chairs. He was reassured that the chairs were actually leather “and this must have been a mistake in the way the item was entered in the system”.
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Love it or loathe it, Aldi is certainly a shop of surprises, a place where unfamiliar washing powders and cornflakes are stacked alongside angle grinders and exercise equipment. Products on special offer often disappear from the shelves in the dead of night, never to be seen in the store again.

For some, its higgledy-piggledy aisles offer endless opportunities to unearth top bargains at low prices, while for others, it is, literally and metaphorically, all over the shop, a tiresome place where inferior products are sold cheaply but still represent bad value.

Aldi has a lot more fans than foes among our readers, and when we quoted one correspondent’s negative impression of the German retailer recently there was outcry on the Pricewatch blog. “I’d be lost without Aldi! It’s so much cheaper. I get a good 90 per cent of my groceries there,” wrote one contributor. “If you’re not tied into a particular brand, Aldi and Lidl offer huge savings,” came another. “The quality of the food is without doubt fantastic. I don’t feel a bit embarrassed about shopping in Aldi, I feel smug,” said a third.

In fact, so effusive were some of the pro-Aldi views that we wondered if the store’s senior management or PR people had been submitting comments under pseudonyms, a notion we discounted on the grounds that the retailer is famously reluctant to communicate on any level with the media.

AT LEAST IT was until last week, when it got in touch about a new programme it is running which aims to prove it’s possible to feed a family of four with tasty meals for a mere €10 using ingredients found exclusively on its shelves. The chef fronting the initiative is Garth McColgan, who also runs a well-regarded FoodActive education programme for children in south Dublin.
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Forget facebook, a bunch of Swiss techies have developed a web-based service which promises to be off-your-facebook. The site, www.localina.com will find a pub just like your local anywhere in the world - all you have to do is type in its details and it will find a matching pub in another specified country. The men behind the site claim it will be ideal for anyone arriving in a new city - as long as they don’t want to experience anything. remotely new or interesting, we would imagine.

I’m off to get the new Radiohead album now (presuming their site will let me in) and I have no idea how much I should pay for it. The band have really wound up the record industry by releasing the album as a download without any support from a record company. Not only that, they have allowed people chose how much they pay for it. I’m thinking a tenner sounds about right? Of course maybe I’ve settled on that amount because that’s what Apple have been telling me I should pay for an album for years. According to NME readers the album is an absolute stormer and the couple of songs I’ve heard were pretty excellent so maybe I should pay more? Then again UnaRocks hasn’t been blown away by it and she’s probably got better judgement about such things than most NME readers. What to do. . . over on Jim’s blog there is, as you might expect, a big debate about the album with loads of Radiohead fans thinking it’s worth only a euro. Seems a bit mean to me but I might be wrong.

This week I reviewed balsamic vinegars for Pricewatch and, unsurprisingly, the most expensive one was the best. (Nearly) all the brands banged on about how their secret recipes have been passed down through the generations and are brewed in ancient oak barrels - it gets a bit wearisome after a while, it’s vinegar for Christ’s sake! Another thing I learned was that there is a direct relationship between the price of the vinegar and the amount of Italian on the box - the more Italian, the higher the price and it really doesn’t matter about the taste. To test them I poured all the vinegars into their own wine glass, swilled them around a bit, smelled them, examined their colours under bright lights and then finally sipped them. I am not proud to admit that with a couple of them I actually drank more than was strictly speaking needed to write the review. I am actually becoming Homer Simpson. Anyways here are the reviews. . .
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A survey comparing Tesco prices in Ireland and the UK caused a bit of a stir when it was released by a rival supermarket in Britain last week.

It showed that Tesco stores in the Republic were on average 15 per cent more expensive than in the UK. The reaction from anyone with even a passing acquaintance with Irish prices probably stood somewhere between “Only 15 per cent?” and “So what’s new?”.
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‘What do you think I’m running, a restaurant?” asked one dentist peevishly when it was recently suggested that he might consider putting a price list outside his practice to help prospective patients make informed choices about whether or not to avail of his services.

This reluctance to be upfront about pricing is not uncommon in a profession where patients’ mouths are often treated like a car engine in the hands of a shady mechanic; they get tinkered with for a few minutes before it is explained, patronisingly, that the problem will cost a ludicrously expensive sum, seemingly plucked from the air, to make right.

That could change if the recommendations contained in a Competition Authority report into the dental healthcare sector are adopted by the Department of Health and the profession. The long-anticipated document, published earlier this week, said an outdated system of regulation had stifled competition and driven up dental costs. It described the absence of price lists in and outside surgeries as anachronistic and called for dentists to be allowed to advertise their services and - crucially - their prices.
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Jaysus! Anyone who has ever downloaded any music using a peer-to-peer service should read this story on ireland.com’s breaking news site today or even on the BBC site where there’s a more detailed version. A US woman has been fined €157,000 for illegally downloading and distributing 24 songs on the internet. The jury awarded a whole bunch of record companies who took the action damages of $9,250 for each of 24 recordings, or a total of $222,000. Apparently the woman is pretty skint at the best of times and broke down in tears when the verdict was annouced. Which is exactly what I would have done if I’d just been told that I’d have to pay 25 per cent of my salary to the big five record companies for the rest of my life. Now, I know that downloading is killing music in much the same way that home taping was in the 1970s taking individuals to the cleaners like this seems absolutely wrong to me.

Some rare good news about a positive customer service experience comes out of Galway this week. A reader recently bought three second-hand computer games for her son, who was recovering from an appendix operation, and paid in cash. She bought the games in Game on Eglinton Street but when she brought them home, one of the games didn’t work. “Typically, I had thrown away the receipt so I was not all that hopeful,” she writes. However, the shop assistant immediately agreed to replace the game and, when he was unable to find a second-hand copy, gave her a new one in its place.

A reader from Templeogue in Dublin contacted us to complain about the cost of parking at the Herbert Park Hotel in Ballsbridge and the way she was treated by staff when she and a friend visited the hotel for a natter and a coffee recently. Othe last Friday of August they went to the Herbert Park Hotel and had a pot of coffee, a pot of tea and a couple of scones. They spent a pleasant three hours in the lobby area and their bill came to roughly €18 so they left a €20 note to cover the tip.

When our reader handed in her parking ticket at reception to have it validated, she was surprised to be asked for an additional €18.50. She explained that she had already paid for the coffee and scones and was told the €18.50 was for parking. She said she’d had a coffee and a scone in the hotel but was told that drinks such as coffee and tea did not count when it came to parking validation. She was told that she would have to have spent at least €10 on food (their scones cost around €6) before the hotel would validate her ticket. “I said this seemed extraordinary and asked if it was a new rule [ she had had her ticket validated on a previous occasion]. I also asked to see a manager only to be told that they were both unavailable.” She then asked to speak to someone in authority but says she was instead threatened with the Garda.
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At first glance, the sleek new 3G modems that mobile phone companies have been promoting heavily in recent months look like an excellent alternative for those unwilling to accept the long lead-in times, high costs and flaky customer service offered by many traditional broadband providers.

You simply buy the modem, plug it into your computer and get instant broadband access at a comparatively low cost. Some of the companies offering the service don’t even require you to commit to any class of contract to get your hands on the gizmos.

Vodafone, 02 and 3 claim to offer internet connection speeds of up to 3.4Mb per second (Mbps), which is perfectly respectable and would allow you download an album from iTunes in under 10 minutes.

Chance would be a fine thing. The key words in all the promotional material are “up to” - the reality is that the connection speeds offered by the 3G modems never come close to 3.4Mbps and sometimes struggle to reach a third of the top speed.
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