SOUNDING OFF: Ripped off? Stunned by good service? Write, blog or text your experience to us
A reader called Tom received a beautifully presented Tesco gift card from an old friend in the North for £10 which he was instructed to use to buy a bottle of wine to mark his 80th birthday.
“You can imagine my dismay and astonishment when a Tesco branch in Rathfarnham refused to accept the card even at parity,” he writes. He says he was told that the store simply did not accept sterling.
“I am now left with a useless voucher as a souvenir of bad management. My 80th birthday party was a great occasion, no thanks to Tesco. We were daily customers to this store.”
We contacted Tesco and a spokesman said: “Unfortunately, the cards are not transferable between here and the north. They are two different systems.”
When we pressed him and pointed out that we were talking about a long-term customer celebrating his 80th birthday and suggested that the more commonsense approach to a one-off situation such as this would have been to allow the man to pay for his €10 birthday bottle of wine with the £10 voucher, even if the tenner had to come out of the store’s petty cash – Tesco makes profits of about €250 million in the Republic, with margins significantly higher than elsewhere in the group – the spokesman went a little further and said they would be willing to “investigate further the circumstances of this incident”.
Just say no Lo
Our item about lo-call numbers attracted a large response from readers who were similarly annoyed by the practice of mobile and landline operators not including 1850 or 1890 numbers as part of their bundled minutes and charging as much as 35 cent a minute for calls to them.
“This is the first time I have encountered anyone who has the same sentiment I have about these numbers,” writes a reader by the name of Valerie. She has an Eircom bundle which gives her free local and national calls but not free lo-calls. She has a plan to circumvent the problem, however.
“Being retired, I check websites first to see if they provide numbers for people ringing from outside Ireland, then ring that landline number. It works. It drives me crazy when I’m told it’s lo-call when I actually have the option of it being a free call. My view is that it is another way of conning the public and I’m amazed no one has taken this up with Government departments,” she concludes.
Another reader named Richard said the best way around lo-call numbers was to use the alternative local number.
“It can be a little bit of work finding it, but I normally use the excellent Say No to 1890 website www.saynoto1890.com/a-to-z/”.
He was just one of a number of readers to cite the website, which has also featured on this page in the past.
And a third reader from Kerry says that, when it comes to over-priced 1890 calls, the “worst culprit is the Government”. He says it is “nearly impossible to contact any Government department”, but when he called Comreg and his local TDs he got the runaround.
