ValueIreland.com

Happy New Year to all our ValueIreland.com readers and subscribers. Here’s hoping that you enjoyed the past couple of weeks, and that you’re looking forward to facing into 2009.

Reading much of the newspaper coverage of the year gone by, and the year that’s just arrived, it seems like it’s going to carry on with all the doom and gloom for us for a while more to come.

While times will be tough for many, it’s also likely that 2009 will bring new opportunities for many as well.

We’re hearing loads at the moment about things like the credit crunch and its fallout, the banking crisis in Ireland, the collapse of the property market, rising prices, and most worryingly the complete lack of leadership coming from our political leaders.

However, as consumers, we can’t really do a whole lot about all these things - so there’s not really much point in complaining or worrying about them. Lots of us have been here before and came out the other side - some of us haven’t experienced tougher times, but what doesn’t kill you will only make you stronger - and recessions don’t kill.

The recent government master plan, Building Ireland’s Smart Economy: A Framework for Sustainable Economic Renewal, is full of much fluff and guff about preparing the country for the end of the recession and the better times that are expected to follow (at some undetermined time in the future). All well and good - but again, not a whole lot for us as individuals.

So what is there for us to do? What we should be doing for 2009 is focusing on all the things that we can actually have an impact on.

We can focus our time, our interest and our concerns on our family, on our work and careers, on our personal finances, on our hobbies and pastimes, and where we go from here.

It’s within all our own personal control to actually make it through 2009 in as best a way as possible, to have a great year despite everything, and to prepare ourselves and our families for the even better times that might come, somewhere over the rainbow.

ValueIreland.com is finishing up today for our Christmas and New Years break. We’ll be back online on Monday, January 5th. We hope you’ve enjoyed what we’ve put together here for you during 2008 and have found it useful and interesting.

We have some exciting plans for 2009 with planned new initiatives and original research for Irish consumers.

Some of these are based on our own ideas, while others are based on feedback from our many valued readers. If you have any thoughts or requests on what you’d like to see here next year, leave us a comment below and we’ll follow up in 2009.

In the meantime, we wish you a very happy and joyous holiday season, and a very successful and prosperous 2009.

This is the last weekend short stack of consumer snippets before Christmas - so a little longer than normal.

• Consumers Association of Ireland Membership Drive - I see that my old friends in the CAI have started their 2009 membership drive. This involves the dropping off of about 7000 December issue Consumer Choice magazines around different parts of Dublin (the nicer even numbered parts so far that I’ve heard). So, 7000 magazines (as announced at the AGM) are given away for free at a cost of €56,000. If normal direct mailing response rates are achieved (lets assume 2%), then that’s 140 new members who’ll pay €96 in membership - a return of €13,440 - a loss on the campaign of over €42,000. Just as well they’re a “non-profit organisation”.
• Paying executive bonus’ or corporate looting - This interesting post from the naked capitalism blog on Thursday had the following statement: “Bankruptcy for profit will occur if poor accounting, lax regulation, or low penalties for abuse give owners an incentive to pay themselves more than their firms are worth and then default on their debt obligations”. The angle of this article was that it applies to the American financial institutions having to be bailed out by the government - same could probably apply to our Irish banks as well.
• Aer Lingus Fuel Recharge Refunds - It seems like I’m not the only person to find absolutely ridiculous the suggestion from the Consumers Association of Ireland that people who bought flights prior to the ending of the Aer Lingus fuel surcharge but flying after that date should have their surcharge refunded. I believe that Joe Duffy devoted a full programme to this non-issue also. Where would this end? I bought a TV last week and it’s now been reduced by 20% in a sale - can I have the difference back? I bought my house a year ago, but the value has dropped 15%, can I get my money back as well? What utter nonsense!!!
• You’re our only customer, so tough shit - I was told a story this week of an English businessman who was staying in a B&B in Sutton Park on the northside of Dublin. When he came down for breakfast in the morning he was told by the land lady that since he was the only person staying there for the night that she wouldn’t be making the full Irish breakfast that is normally provided. He was simply provided with tea and toast, and not even offered a refund for the lack of breakfast. What a great way to treat customers when you most need to keep them happy and coming back.
• Looking for Value over price - Following on from the incident in Sutton Park, here is a great post from Piaras Kelly from earlier in the week - Focus On Value Rather Than Price During The Downturn. As the last line of the article goes: “Instead we should take a hard look at ourselves in the mirror and ask why customers should place a higher value on our good/service and purchase it ahead of a rival or substitute offer”.
• Conor Pope and “Service with a Snarl” - The Prime Time Investigates programme from Monday night generated a few comments on this original post. There’s been some interesting, and not always positive, feedback on the programme on Boards.ie (here and here) and on AskAboutMoney.com. The more that I’ve been running ValueIreland.com, the more I’m beginning to think that we do actually need programmes like this, and Buyer Beware! (despite my criticisms). While most people who are online and making comments about these programmes (me included) might consider themselves fairly consumer rights savvy, there are many many more people out there who aren’t. And programmes like these need to bring consumer issues to their attention - we maybe do need to teach people to suck eggs in some consumer situations. However with that in mind, both Buyer Beware! and “Service with a Snarl” missed fantastic opportunities to give some basic advice to these consumers on what to do, what not to do, and who can help, and who can’t help out in different situations.

As someone who started their first job in the financial services industry in New York in the late 1990’s, the book Liars Poker by Michael Lewis was compulsory reading.

As someone who worked in Salomon Brothers in New York back in the 1980’s, he was around at the development of the products we now know as sub-prime mortgages and the like. He’s left that business over 20 years, but he went back to write a very interesting article about why things are the way they are in the financial markets - in America in particular at the moment.

You can check out the article here. The clincher:

Long Beach Financial was moving money out the door as fast as it could, few questions asked, in loans built to self-destruct. It specialized in asking home­owners with bad credit and no proof of income to put no money down and defer interest payments for as long as possible. In Bakersfield, California, a Mexican strawberry picker with an income of $14,000 and no English was lent every penny he needed to buy a house for $720,000.

If you have a chance to read any of his books, I can highly recommend them.  Though it’s about baseball in the US, his book MoneyBall is brilliant  - it deals with how statistical analysis is taking over sport. As an example, there are actually a couple of English premiership managers who cite MoneyBall (and the people in baseball behind the story) as influencing how they manage their teams now.

Just a few short comments for the weekend.

• ValueIreland.com Housekeeping - We think we’ve been having problems with our e-mail recently, but it’s only come to light on Wednesday. We do reply to all e-mails and phone messages received within 48hours, and have resent some that we thought didn’t get through. So, if you’ve been expecting an e-mail response from us, but haven’t received one, please get back to us.

• Health Insurance Price Rises - This should have gone in last week, but better late than never. The VHI are increasing their price rises by 23% in 2009, and Quinn Healthcare are raising theirs by 16%. Hibernian Healthcare on the other hand will give you a 10% discount and hold that price for 2009 if you change to them on either December 21st or 30th. And don’t forget, despite what your current insurer might lead you to believe, there’s no problem in moving from one company to another - you will not lose cover. Hibernian actually make it easy for you with template cancellation letters for either Quinn or the VHI.

• Explain Yourselves - Seems that that’s the only solution that this government, and the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment in their feigned attempts to address the higher prices in Ireland compared to elsewhere. The grocery multiples have already been called in (without much success as we’ve seen), and now it looks like the mouthful that is the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Communications, Energy and Natural Resources is getting in on the act by calling in the ESB to find out why we have the highest electricity costs in Europe. Not sure much will come from this - if the regulator with the power (pardon the pun) only insists on a 1% reduction in tariffs, a Dail committee isn’t going to get too far.

• Avoid Transport Price Rises - In the past week it has been announced that Dublin Bus and Irish Rail will be increasing their fares early in 2009 because of a fall in passenger numbers. This post from early in 2008 gives you a suggestion on how you might avoid these price rises, at least for a while. Unsurprisingly, there’s no details on the respective websites that I can find, so if we don’t know which tickets are going up by what amount, we’re not going to know which tickets to buy now to beat the rise.

• Fine Gael Launching a thousand rip offs - We had Leo Varadkar give us his Top Tips for Irish Consumers yesterday, and on Tuesday last he was quoted in the Dail as saying he and Fine Gael will be relauching their “Rip Off Ireland” campaign “in the coming weeks”. This will be the second relauch within 12 months. I see that they have redesigned their RipOff.ie website in the past few months (though I’m not sure where the www.bublin.eu links are coming from on some of the pages). They would do well reviewing some of the site contents, particularly on their Links page - references to the ODCA and “interim NCA” are out of date, as are links to the dearly departed ShoppingBill.com and RipOffIreland.org.

Have a great weekend!

A few short points for the weekend:

• Consumer Protection Agency - According to the Irish Independent on Thursday, Ireland has one. If only we had an agency to protect us consumers, rather than one that tells us stuff that we already know and just gives warnings to business that rip us off rather than actually prosecuting them.

• Car sales decline - I see that the motor sales peoples union, the SIMI, has again called for a new scrappage scheme to bail out the garages that are having a tough time because they’re not selling any cars. Maybe if these same people didn’t try to screw money from consumers by having artificially high used car prices for example, they might sell a few more cars.

• Pubs to Freeze prices for a year - As announced on Monday, publicans are to come together to freeze prices for a year in an effort to tempt us back into their premises. Can’t say any more, or any better, than Conor Pope at Pricewatch - “What I, and I suspect many other people, would like to see is a significant price reduction across the board. That might be the only thing that will bring customers back.”

• No Electricity or Gas Price Rises - As expected last Monday, the Commission for Energy Regulation (CER) has not approved the price increases that had been originally requested by the ESB and Bord Gais (but then deemed unnecessary by those same companies). The CER has actually gone a step further and asked the ESB to reduce their prices to consumers, apparently by up to 1% according to RTE Drive time. Brilliant! That’s probably a benefit of approximately €1 every two months for most customers on an average ESB bill. Money in the bank! Don’t waste it!

• Bank Bailout Nominee Directors - The list of directors to be added to the 6 bank boards as the government nominees were announced last Wednesday. Despite having written about this here previously, the list was totally underwhelming. Jobs for the boys, anyone? “We need directors who’ll lift their snouts and squeal” said Sarah Carey in the Irish Times on the morning of the announcement - I just can’t see that listing of people squealing like a pig.

• Bank Bailout (Part 2) - Of course, if the Government becomes a shareholder in the banks, then these nominee directors will actually be legally obliged to report back to the Government - and all other bank shareholders. I wonder was this part of the plan all along back in October when the original unworkable nominee director plan was unveiled.

A few consumer news points for you for the weekend:

• Busy busy week for ValueIreland.com and particularly our Overcharging in Ireland, Check Your Bills, and SayNoTo1890.com initiatives. Following an appearance in the Irish Times on Saturday, there was Pricewatch in the Irish Times on Monday, and the Irish Examiner on Tuesday. There was also George Hook on Monday evening, TV3 on Wednesday morning as well as Radio Kerry and C103 in Cork. Finally, there was Q102 on Friday evening.

• “Go Local” Campaign - We’ve talked many times about buying Irish here in the past month or so. We’re now coming to the end of a week long “go local” campaign led by community organisations across the country - the IFA, the churches, the vintners and the GAA. Did you see any of this campaign in your region? Did it cause you to change your normal buying habits?

• Financial Services Ombudsman complaints – During the week, the Financial services Ombudsman announced that complaints to his office had increased 28% in 2008. 21 example complaints were provided – where 11 were upheld and 10 rejected. Wouldn’t it be nice to have seen who the complaints were made against – particularly where complaints were upheld? A bit of name and shame wouldn’t go astray. Tell us consumers who’s been bad and we can choose better where we can put our business.

• Annual Travel Pass Cost Increases – Lots of comments at work these days where colleagues are suffering from up to 25% increases in their yearly train travel passes – despite possible service cutbacks. I was in Pearse and saw the great incentives from Iaranrod Eireann to entice customers to apply for even these more expensive annual pass tickets. Assuming you just wanted a single or return somewhere, there was only 1 out of a ridiculously insufficient 3 ticket machines working, and it looked like the queue for the ticket kiosk was winding out onto the street it was moving so slowly. And with all that, there were no trains running!
• I received an e-mail this week promoting an apparent new EU consumer awareness campaign - Is It Fair? The e-mail I received had all the hallmarks of being a spam message, though the site looks legitimate upon first viewing. I’ll be following up more on this after I (hopefully) receive a response from whomever sent me the e-mail in the first place.

• I’ve meant to write about this before, but if you’re ever around the Kildare Street / Molesworth Street area and need a coffee and sandwich, then make sure you avoid the BusyBean Cafe on Molesworth Street and head straight for the Petit Cafe Food Co. on Kildare Street. Apart from the food and coffee being a whole lot nicer, the service is unbelieveably better - a pleasure to go there.

Don’t forget that you can send us in your Top Tips that you use in your own lives that we can share with everyone here starting in December.

We’re hoping to get a few well known people to give us their own personal tips as well that we’ll share with you through the coming month.

Click here to read more.

It’s now 4 weeks since the redesigned ValueIreland.com website was published. Many thanks to all those who sent in their feedback on the site! And yes, thank you for the negative comments also. We’ve been very happy with the results of the website redesign ourselves, but we’ve been thrilled to get your positive feedback also.

We are however also following up on your comments and suggestions, a couple of changes have already been made to the site since re-launch, with a few more to come.

Thank you to all those who have subscribed for the RSS feed or e-mail updates! And welcome back to those who have re-subscribed here from the old Value Ireland Blog. We hope you’re all enjoying the redesigned site. Please contact us if you have any further feedback or comments.

ValueIreland.com is now up to over 600 published posts with more than 50 top tips, research articles and consumer resources. We hope that we’re helping you in some small bit to look after yourself better in the Irish consumer landscape we find ourselves in today: helping through drawing your attention to what is being done right, and what’s wrong, with regards to consumer affairs issues we’re experiencing (or are being subjected to), and by providing you with hints, tips and advice on how to better look after yourself.

We have some exciting consumer resources planned for release in the coming months. If you haven’t subscribed for updates already, please use the links to the top right now to do so now. You’ll get our daily consumer updates, plus will be the first to get access to these new resources.

If there are any items that you think should be covered here, please contact us with details and we’ll do our best to follow up.

Many thanks again to all of you,

Diarmuid
Editor, ValueIreland.com

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… C: wait… SD: wait…

A few points and observations for you for the weekend:

• Hotel Bookings - We’re hearing lots recently about how difficult lots of businesses are finding things these days. Hotels are one of those businesses having problems at the moment. Yet we found that they’re not necessarily helping themselves. ValueIreland.com rang a hotel last week to avail of an offer advertised on a hotels website. They wouldn’t take the booking over the phone as it was a “web only” offer. When I pointed out that their website wasn’t working, they still wouldn’t take the business. Oh well!

• Some good consumer news - From the RTE Consumer pages (worth bookmarking!), its expected that the previously proposed electricity and gas price rises are unlikely to go ahead now in January. According to the Irish Independent though, they need to get approval/rejection of their price rise request before doing anything. So, in theory, the CER could approve the price rise, and then Bord Gais wouldn’t actually go ahead with the rise. The same article even mentions that prices may actually fall given current trends. I wonder would it be possible to hold over an approved price rise from CER for it to be implemented at some time in the future by Bord Gais.

• ValueIreland.com Links - As part of our site redesign, we’re looking to put together a comprehensive listing of sites of relevance for Irish consumers. Our Links page is available here. Please have a look and let us know if there are any sites that you’re familiar with that we’re missing.

• Even more good consumer news - It was reported Thursday that even despite the 8c government duty increase on the price of a litre of petrol it’s now dropped below €1 in a few places around the country. According to this AA press release, the recent drop in the price of petrol and diesel could be worth upwards on €30 to €40 in savings to some drivers.

• And Finally - A thought for the weekend, and the weeks coming up to Christmas. When you’re out shopping and looking at the offers available in many of the stores around at the moment, just remember back to what these shops used to be charging before the advent of the “current economic situation”.  Given what they charged before, and how much they’re dropping their prices now, might be worth thinking twice as to whether they deserve your business now.

Have a great weekend!