ValueIreland.com

Here is something to watch out for if you are supposed to be only receiving online bills, and not their paper bills. I checked my bill yesterday as it seemed a little higher than normal.

And it was, because O2 were charging me €1.50 to receive a paper bill even though my account was set up as a paperless bill account and I hadn’t actually received any paper bills.

When I rang up, they quickly refunded me my money without a problem.

So, check your O2 account online if you’re a paperless bill account to make sure they have started to apply this paper bill fee to your account. It’ll be easier get the refund applied to your account before you actually pay it rather than trying to get back money you’ve already paid.

If you’ve found that you too have been charged this fee, come back here and let us know.

Tonight is the 6th and last in the Buyer Beware series on RTE1 with Philip Boucher Hayes. Tonights programme has a taster of what it’s about up on their mini-site:

We look at one specific very low calorie diet (VLCD) - Lipotrim, available over-the-counter in over 120 Irish pharmacies. We interview several people who have taken it, and ask whether closer medical monitoring of patients and sales regulation of these types of diets is needed.

Reporter Philip Boucher-Hayes looks at water safety and tests lifejackets and other types of personal flotation devices (PFDs), and discovers that a relatively new device, costing only €5-should probably be added to the list of must haves for all of us when we head out onto the water.

From a personal perspective, I think that the last item about water safety will be the most beneficial of the whole series for anyone who is watching.

The Irish News of The World picked up on my post last week criticising the programme for not really addressing the major concerns of the Irish consumer:

Rip-Offs TV Anger

RTE’s Buyer Beware TV show has been criticised by a consumers group. Diarmuid MacShane of ValueIreland.com said the show concentrates too much on foreign conmen.

He said: “They’ve taken the easy way out. If you look at the rip-offs by big first here, that’s where most people have problems”. “Not the Mickey Mouse operations from the show”.

An RTE spokesman said: “We are very surprised. We regard it as a very successful show and everyone in RTE is delighted with it”.

Well, they would say that, wouldn’t they. They’d hardly come out and say they were sorry they put the money into it because it hadn’t gained the success of other short consumer series, like those from Eddie Hobbs for example. I thought that was a stunning comment in its arrogance from RTE when I read it first.

I think that the best barometer on the success, or failure as I see it, of the show is the overwhelming silence and lack of coverage following each episode - no one really cares about the show or the contents.

According to this article in yesterdays Irish Independent, Hibernian Life has actually found that it undercharged some of it’s Irish pension customers. According to the article:

INVESTMENT company Hibernian has written to a number of its pension customers telling them it mistakenly under-charged them on their investments and will now increase the charges.
But the life company will not be imposing retrospective charges on people who were not charged the proper fund management charge, the Irish Independent has learned.
It is understood that a number of people who took out pension policies had charges set at 0.75pc when the product literature stated that the annual management charge should be 1pc.

That brings the total count in our Overcharging in Ireland analysis to 47 overcharging incidents admitted to, and 6 incidents of undercharging.

With all the commentary recently about the price differential between southern and northern Ireland, I thought I’d republish a section of a post I originally wrote back in July when this issue was raised following a pointless survey carried out by the National Consumer Agency that told us that the Pope was indeed Catholic.

At the time, I had a few of observations, that are still relevant today. My main interest was to investigate whether or not businesses were actually being honest when they tell us that the price differences are due to the higher costs of doing business in Ireland, and not their naked profiteering greed.

On the same day as the NCA released their research results, it was revealed by the CSO that an average basket of goods costs 5% more in Dublin than it does in the rest of the country. All of the Northern based supermarkets chosen for this current research can easily be described as “country based” – Newry, Enniskillen and Banbridge. Yet all the supermarkets visited down here were Dublin based. I guess it’s reasonable to assume that a similar city (Belfast) vs country divide is just as applicable up there as it is down here. So, let’s assume we add 5% to the northern prices so that we’re comparing like (city = Belfast) with like (city = Dublin) – the “headline” figures from the National Consumer Agency now drop by 5%.

Now, let’s look at the price of wages down here compared to Northern Ireland. There’s no mention of this comparison of this in the National Consumer Agency report. Lets assume that the majority of employees in these stores on a fulltime basis are aged 22 and over. The minimum hourly wage in Ireland is, as of July 2007, €8.65 per hour. The equivalent national minimum wage in Northern Ireland is £5.52 per hour. That’s a Euro equivalent of €6.99. Therefore the cost of labour in Ireland is 24% more expensive than it is in Northern Ireland. I guess that’d be a good reason for things to be more expensive down here than up there.

What about the price of property – to either buy or rent? Do you think the cost of having a retail premises in Finglas, Blanchardstown or Rathfarnham is equivalent to having one in Banbridge, Enniskillen or Newry? If we look at house prices, which everyone is familiar with – a 4 bed, 2 bath detached house with garage in Newry would cost you upwards on €650k while a similar type house in Rathfarnham would cost you double that. A recent CBRE survey on the cost of renting office property showed that Belfast had a rate of €304 per sq metre, while Dublin had a rate of over twice that amount at $860 per sq metre. And on top of that, our comparison shops up north are based in areas there are probably even cheaper to rent – and all in a market where rental rates are falling in the north, while they’re pretty stable down here, over the past 12 months. Again, a legitimate reason for prices to be more expensive down here.

However, we also know that Irish shoppers are more strongly tied to branded items than many of our European neighbours, and as such, we will naturally pay a premium for wanting these branded items. But that’s our choice – we’re not forced to buy these items, but we like them and we chose to.

Irish based retailers will claim that the cost of doing business in Ireland is what causes the price differential we all know and see. While not trying to become an advocate for these businesses, I think that above 3 examples show how this can be somewhat justified.

I’ve written so many times before about this whole euro sterling pricing differential, and each time my message is the same – no matter what retailers or regulators or governments are telling us, the one main factor that will in the long term influence the prices is the shopping behaviour we ourselves follow.

If you think something is expensively overpriced, then don’t buy it. Tell your friends so that they don’t buy it. When that shop suffers a drop in sales, they’ll either drop their prices, or close down. It’s only consumer action that can cause that to happen - or not happen as was the case for the past few years.

ZZZZZZZzzzzzzz!!!! I don’t know why I’m bothering any more, but remember to check out Buyer Beware! tonight on RTE1 at 8.30pm. Even RTE aren’t bothering to update their mini-site for the programme, so it seems that even they’ve lost interest in it as well - this is the 5th episode but the site hasn’t been updated since episode 3.

Overall I think the programme is disappointing in its irrelevance to the majority of Irish consumers. Philip Boucher Hayes isn’t addressing the main reasons for consumer calls to the National Consumer Agency for example, and they don’t address the scams, ripoffs and consumer issues caused by Irish companies.

Instead they’ve taken the easy option of addressing peripheral ripoffs that most people should already be aware of. They’re focusing on scams carried out here by people based outside the country, and haven’t looked much at all at Irish ripoff artists. Obviously RTE wouldn’t want to be annoying anyone in Ireland that might be paying their tv licence, voting for the government parties, or more importantly, paying for RTE advertising.

Anyway, for the 5th episode, this is as much as I can find out:

Consumer series in which Philip Boucher Hayes investigates companies and individuals who have left customers feeling dissatisfied.

Maybe the true scam in all this is that RTE paid money to have this programme produced in the first place?

When is a 0.5% VAT increase the cause of a 4% price increase? Isn’t this the kind of problem we knew was going to happen? Greedy businesses will start using the new 0.5% VAT increase as a further excuse for screwing even more money out of the Irish consumer.

The company with the dubious honour of being the first we’ve been told who’ve announced this kind of underhanded price rise this morning is Eurolink Motorway Operations Ltd.

The toll for the cars using the M4 this morning when from €2.70 to €2.80, as they put it:

Due to the increase in the rate of VAT, from 21% to 21.5%, effective from 1st December, as announced by the Government on Budget Day 14th of October, our prices will rise from the 1st December.

That’s a 4% rise in price - 8 times what should have been the case with the 0.5% VAT increase.

Have you noticed anyone else sneaking in these price rises in the name of the VAT increase?

For the second time in 2008, Hibernian Direct Insurance has been added to the ValueIreland.com Overcharging List of Shame.

As reported in Saturdays Irish Times, this week the Hibernian Direct has had to repay 370 of their customers a total of €16.608, as well as a €45,000 fine to the Financial Regulator. This was because the Financial Regulator determined that Hibernian had broken the consumer protection code.

According to the Irish Time article:

The breaches related to the sale of optional extra cover in relation to motor policies sold by Hibernian. The regulator found that Hibernian did not provide all the information required by the code when selling these extras.

In another case of providential timing, this is the first time in 4 years that the Financial Regulator have fined a financial services company (at least that they’ve told us about) who was found to have unfairly taken (read: stolen) money from their customers.

It was only last Tuesday that the Irish Examiner highlighted the fact that these companies normally get away free and easy for such actions.

It was a pity to see over the weekend that Fine Gael had their National Conference in Whites Hotel in Wexford Town.

Whites Hotel, and an associated company, are at the centre of a dispute with contractors and sub-contractors who are alleging that they haven’t been paid approximately €3.2m for recent work done on renovating the hotel.

Whatever the rights and wrongs, given the recent protests and the controversy over the manner in which the hotel renovations were completed, you’d have thought that Fine Gael would have stayed away.

Ignoring what’s going on isn’t really ending the “softly softly” approach that Fine Gael demanded when they proposed the Consumer Rights Enforcer that would stand up for consumers rights.

Not sure I can even promise to watch Buyer Beware! again this evening at 8.30pm on RTE1. It won’t be creamy pints distracting me this week though. I’ll be attending some consumer affairs related meetings following on from the bombshell this morning that one third of the Consumer Association of Ireland directors Executive have resigned.

Check out the RTE1 website here to see what they might be covering this week. At the time of writing, it hasn’t yet been updated. The best I can find is from their programme guide:

Consumer affairs series. A company which claims to have the best interests of children at heart is found to be offering dangerous drugs advice.

They’re still not covering anything that’s appearing in the top in the top listing of consumer complaints to the NCA. Nor have they covered anything to do with the systematic theft of money from consumers by some of Irelands biggest companies.

Let us know back here if you have any feedback on this evenings show.

The temptation, and subsequent reality, of some creamy pints of Guinness on Thursday evening prevented me from watching the 2^nd episode of Buyer Beware on RTE1.

And unfortunately, this isn’t one of the programmes that RTE allows you catch up on by providing it online. However, based on the topic of bogus modelling agencies, the following Top Tips might be of use to those who may be targeted by such scams.

Did anyone see the programme? Any comments?

As a matter of interest, I was doing some recent research where I was reading through the 2007 Annual Report for the National Consumer Agency. Page 52 of the report shows the top 6 reasons for complaints and information requests to the NCA (78,000 in total during 2007). So far, none of the 4 items covered in Buyer Beware! appear in the top 6 problems for Irish consumers.