Pricewatch: You spot the prices, we ask the questions
Hilary Spurgeon from Palmerstown,Co Dublin bought a packet of Tuc crackers from her local supermarket and paid €1.62. She checked the price in a nearby Tesco and saw the crackers were selling for €1.61. She thought no more about it until her son travelled to Northern Ireland and was able to buy a packet of the crackers in Sainsburys in Lisburn for 68p or slightly more than €1. Not only that, but they were on a buy-one-get-one free special offer so he was given a second packet free.
"This means that his Tucs cost approximately 50 cent per pack compared to more than €1.60. Even omitting the special offer, these Tucs were one-third cheaper up North," she writes.
We went looking for the Tuc and found that the price of a 150-gram packet of the crackers on the Tesco site which caters for the Republic had recently fallen from €1.61 to €1.36. On the Tesco site which services Northern Ireland, however, the same size packets are selling for 72p or just €1.06.
We contacted Tesco to find out why the crackers were selling for the equivalent of 30 cent higher in Dublin when compared with Northern Ireland.
"The simple fact of the matter is that the cost of doing business in the Republic is far higher," a spokeswoman said. "Staff costs are higher, heating and transport costs are higher. All our overheads are higher; that is a well-documented fact and that is the difference between the prices in the Republic and in Northern Ireland," she continued.
She added that a fairer comparison would be to compare the prices of retailers operating within the Republic and expressed her confidence that in such comparisons Tesco would do well.
What's more . . .
BATTERY CHARGING One reader who did compare prices within the same jurisdiction found some price discrepancies which verge on the comical. Humphrey Murphy from Donegal went in search of a battery for his watch in Letterkenny recently. He went first to a jewellers where he found what he wanted selling for €7.50. In a nearby chemist, however, he spotted the same battery selling for €3.50. But it was in a motor store at his local shopping centre where he found the best value. His watch battery was selling there for just €1.80. "There appears to be a posh value attached to these small batteries which is linked to where you go looking for it," he has now concluded.
AH, GO ON Recently a reader got in touch to highlight the difference in the cost of the Father Ted box set in shops in Cork, where prices ranged from €49.99 to €69.99. When we went looking online, we found that amazon.co.uk left the Irish shops in the ha'penny place by charging just €45, including delivery for all three series on DVD. Andrew Dunne subsequently got in touch to say that by shopping around online, using www.find-dvd.co.uk, you can get it even cheaper still. He found one company which was able to deliver the box set to your door for about €37, or nearly half the price it was selling for in one shop in Cork.
