You spot the prices, we ask the questions

Dishing the dirt

Helen Carragher from Knocklyon in Dublin had a problem with her Bosch dishwasher before Christmas. As she had bought the machine through the ESB's retail unit, she contacted the company to check if it was still under guarantee.

"Two or three days after we asked for this information, the ESB rang us back," she writes and, having told her what she wanted to know, offered to arrange for a person to fix the dishwasher - "for a call-out charge of €100".

However, while Carragher was waiting to hear back from the ESB, she had contacted Bosch directly. "A service man came out and got our machine going again (he also told us the problem could have been sorted over the telephone, but that's another complaint!), gave us a tutorial on dishwasher maintenance [ all] for a fee of €78.77." This means that had she gone through the ESB to fix it, it would have been 27 per cent more expensive.

As of the end of last year, the ESB is no longer in the retail business but is still operating a warranty hotline for customers. PriceWatch unsuccessfully tried to contact the ESB's retail unit (whose email address, incidentally, is goldmine@esb.ie - named after a computer programme and not a reflection of cash takings, apparently).

When we eventually got in touch with the company a spokesman apologised to our reader for the delay in the ESB contacting her after her initial query and said the company's policy "has always been to act as an intermediary and refer customers to the manufacturer" rather than arrange repairs. He said that the ESB made "no financial gain for any warranty services offered" and could not explain why there was such a discrepancy between the cost of repair through the ESB as opposed to contacting the manufacturer directly.

What's more . . .

Hannah Daly from Tullamore has been in touch to complain about the "ridiculous" price of a lunch she had in Debenhams in the run-up to Christmas. Taking a break from her frantic present hunt, she paid a visit to the cafe in the department store where she ordered a cup of coffee and a cheese salad sandwich to revive her flagging spirits.

The coffee was self-service and lukewarm, she says, and "didn't even taste of coffee". Despite this, it still cost her €2.10. She points out that a black coffee made by Baristas in any one of the growing number of specialist coffee shops in the city costs less than this.

The sandwich was made by cafe staff and featured grated cheddar, tomato and lettuce on a small brown roll. "It was fine, nothing special about it at all, but at €5.55, I nearly fainted. How can they justify charging such prices? I think it is appalling," she says.