In May, Minister for Enterprise Micheál Martin, ushered the long-anticipated Consumer Protection Act (CPA) through the Dáil; and one of the key elements of the new law was a ban on traders hitting people with extra charges depending on how they chose to pay.
The ban, when implemented, would stop businesses penalising their customers for using credit cards to make bookings (Ryanair) or for paying by direct debit (Quinn Insurance) or for not paying by direct debit (NTL).
Delight at the surprise inclusion of a particularly consumer friendly clause in the bill was tempered, however, when it became clear that Martin had decided against introducing the ban immediately after fierce lobbying from the travel industry and certain operators from within the telecommunications sector.
(more…)
The Consumer Protection Act is nearly a year old and I was wondering if anyone has felt any more protected since it came into force? And has the National Consumer Agency, which was set up under the Act, done a good job in its first 12 months of official existence?
My computer is hot and I’m bothered. It’s a Sony Vaio which is, as I type, almost too hot to touch - way, way too hot to touch. Is that normal? Should I be concerned? What do you reckon the likelihood is it will burst into flames before I finish this post and take me with
Mairéad Ní Cheallacháin got in touch with us looking for help to get NTL/UPC to stop cold-calling her trying to sell her services she doesn’t want. “I have had a number of service problems with NTL in the past, none of which was dealt with even remotely satisfactorily, and if I could think of an alternative TV service I would switch in the morning.” She says a detailed account of her various grievances, which she sent in writing a year ago, remains unacknowledged and unanswered.
(more…)
THE SPIRALLING PRICE of food has been big news in recent weeks, with simmering tensions boiling over into lethal violence in Haiti, Egypt and the World Bank and the IMF issuing dire warnings about the impact the current food inflation will have on at least 33 other countries in the developing world.
The problem of rising food prices is being felt the world over. Global warming, poor growing conditions in major cereal-producing countries, oil reaching record highs and greater affluence in parts of Asia have all combined to create this perfect storm which has put enormous pressure on food prices over the last 12 months.
Unsurprisingly, Ireland has not been immune to the price hikes, and while a year ago people here thought they were paying over the odds for groceries, it is now clear the worst was yet to come. This month’s figures from the Central Statistics Office showed inflation hitting 5 per cent and the rate of food inflation at 0.9 per cent or an annual rate of close to 10 per cent.
(more…)
Aer Lingus has been forced into an embarrassing climbdown and is to offer economy class seats to all the customers who booked €5 business class flights to the US “in error”. “Following a full investigation of the booking error undertaken yesterday evening by the company, it appears that some customers may have genuinely believed that they were making a booking in economy class,” the company said . It said it was going to contact affected passengers so they could rebook their travel arrangements and described the error as “regrettable”.
And that’s putting it mildly. Within hours of the sorry tale hitting the headlines at home, news organisations in Sydney, London and New York and dozens of other places in between had picked up the story. Not only that but Aer Lingus also had to endure a lecture in good customer service from Ryanair, of all companies.
All in all not a good day then.
Aer Lingus cancelled the bookings of over one hundred customers who booked business class return tickets to the US yesterday for nominal prices, saying that the low, low fares had been made available in error. The tickets for flights to New York and Boston were made available ranging in price from nothing at all to a fiver. The tickets normally sell for €1,775 one-way. The offer was withdrawn a couple of hours later after which passengers who thought they had made reservations received sheepish emails from Aer Lingus saying that “due to a technical error in our reservation system a small number of bookings were priced incorrectly” and that the booking was cancelled. We’ve a story on our breaking news site with more details. I’ve spoken to the airline today and it seems there is no chance at all it is going to honour the tickets.
Except maybe it will be forced to. Seconds after I wrote that last sentence, I got a strong statement from the National Consumer Agency. “Blaming a technical error in their booking system in not good enough,” said the Chief Executive Ann FitzGerald. “Aer Lingus formed a contract with the consumer at the stated fare and cannot simply walk away from their obligations”. The National Consumer Agency has been in contact with Aer Lingus this morning and is seeking a meeting with senior management in the company with a view to reaching a fair deal for those customers affected.
Keith Duffy and his da are going to re-open Frawleys. The Liberties landmark is going to sell clothes in “larger sizes” apparently.
Fair City’s Jimmy is caught in a love triangle.
The Bachelor Inn is changing hands.
Poorly made rivots made the Titanic sink faster.
The inhabitants of a small Argentinean village where the ‘domino affect’ Guinness ad was filmed don’t really like Guinness.
And romantic opportunities will soon be coming my way
Yay! The cheapest product comes out on top against all the odds!
(more…)
SOMETIMES IT’S THE simplest scams that catch people out. Forget the widows of West African dictators and their suitcases of blood diamonds, or the surprising Spanish lottery wins that come your way without you having to buy a lottery ticket; a number of scams which have been doing the rounds in recent months are a lot less elaborate and maybe just a little more convincing than that. Scammers have taken to posting bogus ads on legitimate websites offering cars at knock-down prices - the only problem being that these bargains don’t exist. A number of people who have contacted Pricewatch in recent weeks have had first-hand experience of this particular scam; one came within hours of being taken for nearly €4,000.
(more…)
Joseph O’Reilly from Booterstown has another issue with the same store. He was recently walking around Superquinn in Blackrock for the first time in a while and noticed a large number of promotional signs on a number of different products which were emblazoned with the phrase “Price Match”. “The sign caught my attention as a potential promotional item which I should investigate further. It went on to list the price of the item in Tesco, Dunnes and Superquinn as exactly the same.” He thought it was odd that Superquinn was trying to sell him the product by claiming their price was exactly the same as at Tesco or Dunnes.
“It occurred to me that such evidence in any other business would be seen as ‘cartel-like activity’ and anti-competitive. An alternative view on this ‘Price Match’ approach is that Superquinn is really trying to tell its customers that all products without this sign are in fact over-priced in comparison to Tesco or Dunnes. Which is it?”
We contacted Superquinn again and on this occasion recieved the following short statement: “It is important that we offer our customers value across our ranges. The price match communication in store is to reassure our customers that we do offer them value.”
Visiting his local Superquinn in Limerick, David O’Connor was surprised to see two large carousels full of cuddly toy dogs with a big sign overhead saying, “FREE, bring one home today”. Being very sceptical of free offers, he looked more closely at the offer and discovered it came with conditions written in small print “on a small card in a small holder attached to the carousel”. In the checkout queue he saw a young mother with a toddler in her arms clutching a free cuddly dog, he says. “Behind me was another mother with a four-year-old, sans cuddly toy. The mother with the toddler put her free dog on the line with her groceries, and was informed it was not free but conditional on her buying €250 worth of goods.”
(more…)
A yong girl can look forward to getting a lump of coal this Christmas if she’s lucky after she threw all her unfortunate parents savings out the window of their 17th floor flat in the Chinese city of Shenzen. The poor little girl threw the equivalent of nearly €1000 out the window while her parents slept. When they woke up and noticed the cash missing they asked her what had happened, but she denied any knowledge of the missing money, as you would. It wasn’t until the owner of a restaurant on the first floor of the building told the couple that money had been raining down on to the street, and that passers-by had gone crazy trying to catch it, that they realised where their savings had gone. The couple are now hoping the kindness of strangers will see the money returned to them.
More bad news about prices today comes from the Central Statistics Office with the latest inflation figures hitting five per cent. What’s even more depressing is that the rate of inflation for food and non-alcoholic drink was 0.9 per cent last month which equates to over ten per cent annually. The news will come as no surprise to Irish shoppers with a keen eye on the price of their goceries.
The prices of basic foodstuffs here has soared in the last 12 months. Bread is up around 23 per cent , flour is up 40 per cent, the cost of milk is approximately 30 per cent higher and eggs, butter and biscuits - all the things that are to be commonly found in Irish shopping baskets - are also significantly dearer.
There was a time when we could blame price increases like this on profiteering and greed on the part of the retailers but that doesn’t appear to be the case in this case – at least not entirely. The problem of rising food prices is a global one and it is only going to get worse. In this the first time in decades that we have seen such sustained global price rises.
(more…)
Earlier this year we carried an item about the residents of an apartment complex in west Dublin who voiced their concerns about bad reception and poor customer service from their provider, Smart Telecom. When we contacted Smart on the residents’ behalf, the company acknowledged “that technical difficulties in the past have caused frustration for residents”, but said it believed the technical issue was now resolved “and that the new upgraded service is providing an excellent service”.
A resident of the complex, Sarah Walsh would beg to differ. She has had Smart Telecom in her apartment since October 2005. “About two days after it was installed, I started having serious problems,” she writes. “Smart Telecom have had engineers, senior engineers and their top IT people through the apartment to fix the continual problems that I have with my service.”
(more…)
One of the most read pieces on the New York Times website this afternoon is an alarming story about the sudden deaths of a number of bloggers. In Florida last month Russell Shaw a 60-year-old blogger on technology subjects died of a heart attack. In December, another tech blogger, Marc Orchant, went the same way and at around the same time a third, Om Malik, 41, survived a heart attack. The paper reports that other bloggers have been complaining about weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, exhaustion and other illnesses which they attribute to the non-stop strain of producing for a news cycle that never sleeps.
While the Times accepts that there is no official diagnosis of death by blogging and sudden death of two people obviously probably doesn’t qualify as an epidemic, it says “friends and family of the deceased, and fellow information workers, say those deaths have them thinking about the dangers of their work style”.
I’m going for a little lie down now.
I was feeding my baby yesterday evening when something alarming happened. She was eating in a distracted fashion, as is her wont, and casually shaking her cup about the place. All the shaking brought to mind that Shake n’ Vac ad from the 1970s so I started singing it, as you do. The terrible thing is that while I haven’t thought about or seen the ad for 25 years I was still able to sing every single word of the song. Every single word! It’s not that long, I know but I still can’t believe that a small part of my brain has been given over to remembering the jingle for such a ridiculous product all this time when it could have been better employed remembering where I left my keys last night, the name of anyone I am ever introduced to for more than 15 seconds or how the modh coinniollach worked (or even how it was spelt) back when I was doing my Leaving Cert. So of course I had to go and find the silly ad on youtube and have been singing it (against my will) all afternoon. I’d love to know what it is about it that makes it so irritatingly memorable and if there are any other ones that have the same affect on others.
Today, I got an email asking me to join the “BritishSmokersGroup” Apparently “everyone who joins this new group gets over 200 FREE books” (the email doesn’t tell me what the books are about, but I’d say they’re brilliant). It assures me that as a new member I will also be informed where I can “get a ton of other FREE stuff!” (again, no clue as to what this stuff is but as long as it’s FREE I’m laughing). And do I have to actually smoke to avail of this fantastic offer? Luckily no. “You do NOT have to be a smoker to join the group!” the mail assures me, although if I’m not a smoker, news about how I can make big savings by buying cigarettes and tobacco online will be of marginal interest. Still, there’s always the free books and other FREE STUFF to look forward to.
Barcelona’s Bojan Krkic has just become the first player born in the 1990s to score in the Champions’ League.
Sigh.
