Value Ireland Note: We very much enjoyed this article and have always believed much of what Brenda Power is saying.

Brenda Power: They rip us off only because we invite it
May 22nd, 2005

If you went into a shop to buy yourself a sweater and the assistant accidentally charged you double the marked price, what would you do? Point it out there and then and insist that she charged you the correct sum? Or would you trundle home, grumbling about the excessive charge and resolving to ring Joe Duffy and complain that the government really ought to do something about this sort of thing? Without doubt, you would like to think that you would kick up a fuss, ask to see the manager if there was any hesitation about making good the injustice, and maybe even warn friends to check their receipts and change when they shopped there again. Only a sucker who deserved to be ripped off would be too wimpish to complain. Yet step forward, the average Irish consumer.

The evidence that we are being robbed blind on a daily basis is now indisputable. We didn't really need last week's survey which told us we pay an average of 23% more for goods and services in this country than our European counterparts, or that 87% of us feel we are frequently overcharged. We already know we're being scalped at every turn and yet we seem thoroughly perplexed as to what to do about it.

The worst that retailers can expect from you when they overcharge is a heavy sigh as you reach for your credit card. If it is particularly blatant thievery, you might just make a phone call to a radio station or send a letter to the newspapers. And when the rip-off is shameless, as it recently has been, you might even stir yourself to demand the government do something about it.

But perish the thought that you would take matters into your own hands and assume some responsibility for allowing yourself to be screwed by all-comers at will. You're the one who willingly hands over too much of your hard-earned cash to the highwaymen who run the restaurants, mobile-phone networks and petrol stations, yet somehow it still manages to be somebody else's fault, and somebody else's duty to redress it.

So last week the government announced the appointment of a new consumer czar to champion the rights of ripped-off customers. We've been promised that the new National Consumer Agency will have more teeth than the Office of Consumer Affairs it replaces. We now know what we must do when we're ripped off: complain to somebody else.

We now have another line of defence to stop us taking our displeasure out on the retailers and service providers who are creaming it at our expense. From now on, we must direct our indignation to Ann Fitzgerald and, when we continue to be ripped off, we must channel our anger and frustration at her. Or to her office, or to the government, or to the enterprise minister, or to just about anybody except the ones who are actually robbing us.

It wouldn't take much, for example, to make the mobile-phone operators rethink the pricing policies that ensure we pay more than a third above the European average for our calls. If all mobile users made a resolution to cease all non-essential calls and texts for a week, or even for a day, they'd feel the pinch pretty quickly.

How difficult could that be? Think of how, in pre-mobile days, you lived in ignorance of the fact that a loved one was on the bus and would be home in 20 minutes, or how you muddled through without being texted the news that the person you were meeting for a drink was sitting at the back of the bar.

But while we enjoy the bonding experience of a convivial grumble — about prices, about appalling public transport, about rude service — we're not so good at taking matters a step further and using the strength of numbers to make a stand. Some brave souls attempted an e-mail campaign last week to persuade us to stay away from the petrol pumps for just one day. If we had all boycotted the filling stations last Thursday, the organisers maintained, even that small ripple on the global fuel market would have made an impact. Except it would have taken a bit of effort, a bit of forward planning, maybe a little bit of inconvenience so, in the end, nobody really bothered.

There was a similar response, three years ago, to an effort to emulate Greek resistance to euro changeover rip-offs. The Greeks refrained from any shopping for one particular day, and the result was dramatic enough to compel their retailers and service providers to look again at their changeover calculations. When the same tactic was proposed here, lots of bright sparks had the brainwave of picking that day to enjoy their retail therapy on the basis that the shops would practically be empty.

Result: some stores enjoyed bumper takings.

Impotent grumbling about rip-off Ireland seems about as far as any of us are prepared to go. A caller to RTE's Liveline last week complained about the huge difference plainly visible on price tags in a prominent clothes retailer, which display the cost of the garments in various EU countries. Sweaters that cost about €60 in France and Spain and Germany were priced at €140 here. The woman's response was to ring a radio show, but it didn't sound as though she had registered any protest with the staff in the store — and she continued shopping there.

Naming and shaming the guilty parties is effective only if it prevents other lemmings from trooping in to the same rip-off net, and there's no evidence to suggest that we are capable of learning from our mistakes, let alone from anybody else's. The reason that the retailer cannot be bothered to conceal the fact that they are charging us twice what our EU neighbours pay for the same product is because we fully deserve their contempt.

It may be a cultural side-effect of evolving such a highly developed compensation radar, but we certainly seem to have become wedded to the notion that somebody else is always to blame for our misfortunes. If you burn yourself with scalding tea in McDonald's, that is obviously its fault for making tea with hot water in the first place. If your child grows obese from eating too many Big Macs, it follows that must be McDonald's fault, as well.

The causal connection between greed and laziness and obesity is broken — if you are fat and unhealthy it's not because you ate too much, it's because the government didn't warn you to stop putting junk food in your mouth. And if you're robbed by retailers in broad daylight it is not because you were too supine to object, it is because the government didn't appoint a consumer czar in time. Can you feel a compensation claim coming on?