SOUNDING OFF: Ripped off? Stunned by good service?  Write, blog or text your experience to us

Jack Butler got in touch with a story about what he describes as “just another gift card rip-off, this time by mobile operator O2”.

As a Christmas present his family clubbed together and bought him an O2 gift card worth €200. “I went online to use it at the O2 online store where I selected a phone at a cost of €329,” he writes. It turned out that the gift voucher was not accepted online, so at the beginning of January he called into an O2 store in Limerick where exactly the same phone was selling for €399.

“There is nothing on the gift voucher to state it cannot be used online and the O2 shop manager informs me that it is not possible for them to refund the amount paid,” he writes. “I am seriously considering moving to another operator but wonder if all of them are the same? Perhaps you could use your column to alert others to what I consider to be another piece of nasty sharp practice.”

We got in touch with O2, and a spokesman said that the handset in question was priced differently online and in 02 stores when our reader went looking but that, just a couple of days later and before he contacted us, the in-store price was lowered to €329.

The spokesman also confirmed that O2 gift cards cannot be used on its online shop. “The technology required to process and verify the gift card details for use in an online transaction is complex, and while not yet in place, O2 is currently working to implement it as soon as possible,” he said.

He said the company “regularly runs promotional offers on selected devices where, as part of the promotion, the device may be made available at a cheaper price online for a given period of time. Such online promotional offers are common industry practice.”

Holy cow

Another reader, also by the name of Jack, sent us an e-mail highlighting another substantial euro/sterling price difference. “I suppose it is my own fault for even considering buying a leather recliner in these recessionary times,” he writes, “but I have found a case of daylight robbery at Argos that you have to write about in your column.”

The product in question is a black Nuovo Pelle-Harrison reclining chair “On Argos.ie it is €749.99 but on Argos.co.uk it is £489.49 ! Is it any wonder there is a tailback coming out of Newry?” he writes.

Fruit squeeze

A Dublin reader got in touch about a gripe he has with Superquinn. He has shopped in Superquinn in Sutton for over 20 years and he buys 12 red grapefruits there every week. “Sold loose, we had been paying 49 cent each up to about last September, when the price went up to 59 cent, an increase of 20 per cent.”

In November, Superquinn stopped selling loose grapefruits in favour of a pre-packed nets of three “and, lo and behold, the price jumped up to €2.49 per pack – equivalent to a price of 83 cent each. This is an increase of almost 41 per cent on the price for the comparable loose grapefruits when they were available, or a whopping 69 per cent increase over the period of a few months. Apart from the price increase, Superquinn had decided to limit the choice of this item to pre-pack only whilst continuing to sell the less popular white grapefruits in loose format,” he writes.

In January, he brought this “unsatisfactory state of affairs” to the attention of staff in Sutton, pointing out that loose red grapefruits were available in a nearby Dunnes Stores outlet for 59 cent and in Nolan’s of Clontarf at 40 cent each. He was promised a call back but none came, so he contacted the head office and was told the matter was being reviewed and, until the review was complete, there was nothing that could be done.

Raising the bar

Helen Gallivan sent us a mail about the “vast discrepancy in the price of a regular bar of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk”. She was charged €1.05 in a petrol station recently. “I thought that was bad until I went into Centra on Marine Rd, Dún Laoghaire, where I was asked for €1.15! I didn’t buy it but went around the corner to the newsagent in the basement of the Dún Laoghaire shopping centre, where the same bar cost 90 cent.”