For something used almost every day by nearly every household in Ireland, the business of bins can be hideously complicated.
There are multiple ways to pay a multitude of companies that have an array of bins in multiple colours, with the timetable of collections sometimes baffling even the keenest of rubbish watchers.
In a world of such dizzying confusion, it can be hard to keep on top of things and easy to end up paying over the odds even when you are an assiduous consumer who watches your outgoings like a hawk, as a reader by the name of Mark discovered to his cost recently.
Mark has been a customer of Panda for many years and, for most of those years, had been on a pay-by-weight option as opposed to a monthly fixed charge.
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He was happy enough with the way things were.
Not long ago, he was reviewing his household bills and “discovered that I was put on a monthly charge without notice by Panda in May 2023. Bigger fool I for not keeping more closely in touch,” he says, before stressing that it is “not a mistake I intend to make again”.
He spoke with one of Panda’s staff who told him that his account had “been reviewed by a team” and that he had been put on a monthly plan “because that was the best option for me. Nonsense, of course, since I produce little waste as would be clear from a review of the account, and I have no doubt that this is why my account was ‘reviewed’.”
He says he was told “repeatedly without evidence that I had been made aware of this change at the time by email. I was not and I have a full digital record from the time and I know for a fact that I was not so informed.”
He says the way the company persisted in telling him that he had been told of the change was “extremely annoying, as well as disrespectful”.
He says that when the call ended, he was promised “a higher-ranked official would review the case and come back to me. I did not believe for a moment that that utterance was meant when it was made, and no follow-up phone call has been made.”
In a letter he wrote to the company that he shared with us, he said the “behaviour of Panda in this one case raises considerable questions over the manner in which it does business. I regard the change made to my account as improper practice.”
We contacted the company, and in response, a spokesman said that in 2023, Panda streamlined the number of different customer plans it offered.
“In all cases where a customer was moved to a new plan, that customer was communicated with directly by email. The details of any new plan were set out, and it was made clear in the customer email that if the new plan did not meet their needs, Panda would discuss alternatives with them. The default plan that was offered was the cheapest plan on the market for the vast majority of Panda customers.”
The company checked their records, and established that our reader “was sent an email detailing the change on the evening of April 13th, 2023”.
The statement suggested that, as our reader used a corporate email account, “it may be the case that a company firewall blocked the email in question. However, the email regarding the change to his plan was definitely issued.”
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We put this to Mark, who said that every other piece of correspondence from Panda had been delivered successfully, and he expressed surprise or disbelief that the only mail that would be swept up by his company’s spam filters would be the one that ended up costing him money.
So we went back to Panda and it emerged that the email was sent “using a different customer data system than the system that Panda uses for monthly bills”, and it was suggested that it could “possibly explain why a firewall may have intercepted this particular email, but not others”.
In any event, the company said that our reader’s account would be switched to “an equivalent pay-by-weight plan and [we] will endeavour to find a comprehensive solution to the issue that he has raised”.
The company also apologised “for the fact that [our reader’s initial contact with Panda] did not elicit a more complete response to his query”.
