Tesco computer says no:Fiona Cooke checked her bank account last week and had around €80 in it, so she took herself off to Tesco in the Merrion Centre in Dublin to do her shopping.
She spent €70.85, gave them her card and entered her pin. The keypad read “transaction aborted”.
She was told that the store had had problems with the card system and the staff member tried again. “No joy. Bewildered, I gave him €15 cash from my wallet and tried yet again. It still wouldn’t go through so he directed me to an ATM opposite the juice bar.” She put her details in and got the message we all dread: “insufficient funds”.
She went back to the till and said she’d leave it, but since he’d put the €15 through, he apparently couldn’t do that. “He printed off my receipt and directed me to the customer service desk, telling me that they’d had better luck with other customers’ cards.” At customer service, the card was tried again with the same result. She logged on to her bank account from a public internet access point – only to see that her account balance had reduced by €70 and some cents. She phoned her bank and was told that the “Tesco transaction for €70.85 was somewhere in the electronic ether and the funds were unavailable to me.” Tesco didn’t have the cash but the bank could not return it to her until Tesco’s system voided or returned the transaction.
“I was very annoyed with my bank, but in fairness they did offer me an immediate overdraft which was not an option I was prepared to take. I’ve been very careful not to go into the red.” She went back to the customer service desk and was told they could keep the goods overnight if she wanted to come back the following day and pay for them (again). “That wasn’t about to happen either. I needed the groceries and by making the funds unavailable to me I couldn’t even purchase them elsewhere. I eventually asked my father for his credit card details and paid the balance of €55 with that.” The duty manager contacted Tesco’s IT support and was told there was no issue with their machines.
“I’d just like to offer my experience to any other Tesco customers out there. Unless you have access to significant funds and don’t mind Tesco holding on to multiple amounts of your bill, paying by cash is a sensible option. Shopping elsewhere is another.”
We contacted Tesco and a spokesman said that having investigated the matter “it would appear that when trying to process the customer’s card at the checkout, a security blocking mechanism was activated. This resulted in the cost of the shopping being temporarily frozen by the bank. We would like to apologise to the customer for the inconvenience caused and will be contacting her directly. There are no indications of any problems with our system in the Merrion store last Wednesday.”
Not a case of vive la différence
Seamus Walsh came across a small but peculiar pricing anomaly on the Al Italia website. Flights booked through the French language version of the site cost €5 less than those booked through the Irish region part of the site. Recently he was booking a flight from CDG (Paris) to FCO (Rome) on alitalia.com. “The homepage asks, through a drop-down menu, your country of residence. I choose France, seeing as I’m currently living in Paris. I filled out the travel dates and number of passengers and was presented with a cost of €121.41.” He then stopped and decided to go through the same process but with the English language version.
“I use a service called tripit.com to scan my inbox. It automatically scrapes any flight/hotel/train confirmation e-mails and auto-imports them into their site, it’s a very handy travel organisation tool. The tripit website seems to support only English, so I assumed it wouldn’t be able to handle a flight confirmation e-mail in French and would throw a wobbler.” He went back to alitalia.com and choose Ireland as his country of residence. “The alitalia website doesn’t give an option to change language as this seems contingent on your place of residence, so in order to get an English language version with euro as the currency, you need to choose Ireland. I entered the same flight details and behold, all the flight prices were exactly €5 extra (€126.41 for my particular one).”
We decided to give it a whirl. We went to the site and said we were resident in France and wanted to fly to Rome from Paris in June. We were given a price of €121.40. We then said we lived in Ireland and wanted to fly to Rome from Paris on the same dates and, sure enough, we were asked to pay another fiver.
