Price comparison calculus and the mathematics of complaint

Tánaiste Mary Harney is clearly fed up with people whingeing about the pub down the road selling pints cheaper than the pub they’re drinking (and whingeing) in.

Mary Harney wants the drinking whingers to take responsibility, do the math and move to the cheaper pub.

Indeed, judging by her tone of voice, if they don't get a move on, she'll propel them from the dearer to the cheaper pub on the toe of her boot.

She's right, of course. If people have two good legs, there's something severely wrong with them if they don't employ those legs for transport to where they can buy whatever they want to consume at a cheaper price.

Now, OK, what's wrong with them may be basic Irishness. Not being racist, but the Irish would much rather complain than fix.

We'd much rather bear a grudge than a solution. Vocal victim is our default position and where would the phone-in programmes be if we were otherwise?

And now here's the deputy Prime Minister attacking our basic rights. If Sir Bob were her spokesman, he'd be summarising her viewpoint thus:

"If you can't be arsed to go to the cheaper pub, then shut up with the moaning. You're part of the problem."

It's all very upsetting. We've been raised, educated, trained and accustomed to clapping one hand to our forehead while pointing to the latest outrage with the other and saying,

"This is the Government's fault, they must do something about it."

Up to now, Government spokespeople have gone along with us.

They've maybe whimpered that throwing money at the problem won't solve it, but we all know that's like our mothers saying if you pick that scab, it won't get better, and we've tried it and it did.

But we don't tell our mothers, because their self-esteem is tied up in advice like that and anyway we have to say the same thing to our own kids.

Everything's grand as long as everybody plays by the rules. But the Tánaiste either doesn't know the rules or isn't playing by them. She's giving us no sympathy for being exploited.

She's not promising a task force or an inquiry or nuthin'. In fact shock, horror she's blaming the victim. More or less telling us all to compare prices and go where we get the best bargain.

This woman clearly has no future. She'd better go out to Europe and be a Commissioner or something.

Being an EU Commissioner is a whole lot easier and better-paid, as jobs go, than being a price comparer. I spent seven years of my life doing the latter.

Not every day, you understand. Just once a week, for a radio programme. Once a week was enough.

One day comparing prices and you're ready to chew the curb on the way home. You cannot, for example, assume that if you pick up a can of Whiskas priced at 89c, all its Whiska companions are the same price.

The Beef and Gizzards variety may be cheaper this week than the Tuna and Sheep kind.

Or the first can could be a leftover from the June batch and accordingly be cheaper than the July arrivals all around it.

Inflation will do that to Whiskas. So committed price comparers must check the labels of three different units of each item in each shop. In a basket of as few as twelve items being compared between, say, Tesco, Superquinn, Dunnes Stores and Centra, that's nearly 150 separate prices. Enough to make you realise the limitations of the back of the average hand as a place to note the differences.

Nor do the complications stop there. Seasonal and store varieties are a nightmare.

Hallowe'en is hell. Every supermarket has its own brack, each one makes it in marginally different sizes and weights, and each accessorises its brack uniquely.

One store will take a minimalist, Bauhaus approach, inserting just one ring, whereas the shop down the road will have the Kelly Osbourne of bracks, decked out in twigs, rags, rings, coins and beads, in a challenge to the buyer's every tooth.

As for comparing the prices forget it. Price comparison has its rewards. There's a kick to finding the occasional quantum leap in cost between one emporium and another.

Except that the quantum leap is always on something inessential, like carbo-covered rice cakes or fruit-of-the-forest air freshener.

Those exceptions aside, the bottom line of comparison grocery-shopping is that it is best done by the bike-riding child-free obsessive jobless.

Bike-riding, because if you use a car, you waste any savings on petrol and worsen everybody's asthma with your emissions.

Child-free, because spending a day comparison-shopping with children has to be some form of abuse in itself yet having them cared for, as we all know, would wipe out the profit.

Obsessive, because a grid or computer program is needed to collate and compare the data, and jobless, because anybody who has a job right now spends so much time getting to and from that job that not even to please the Tánaiste could they find the time to do serious price-comparing.

However, since prices are inflating as fast as the Hulk and likely to run much longer than he is, reviving the tradition of the actively discerning assertive consumer might be a good idea.

I said this to the driver of the taxi in which I was travelling when the Tánaiste gave her bracing advice.

It's always fun to praise a Progressive Democrat to a taxi driver. Especially if you're reasonably near where you're going to when you do it.

This particular taxi man got quietly analytical, rather than hostile. The issue, he said, is not one of individual prices.

The issue was an overall price inflation which left the Irish customer sheared like a sheep when compared to other Europeans, a price inflation which is too frequently justified by the extra costs involved in getting goods to an island nation.

"Lanzarote is an island too," he pointed out. "Same as Ireland. Only worse. Much smaller. Not near a big trading partner like Britain. Volcanic, too, so the only thing that'll grow on it is a few oul' vines. Far away from everything. But it's cheap. Really cheap by comparison with Ireland."

No matter what item was mentioned, he could give the direct contrast between Lanzarote prices and Irish prices, right down to a steak dinner "with everything".

As a holiday-maker, this was important. "You can't tell tourists to shop around," he said. "They're only here a week. They should be able to trust the Government to make sure they're not ripped off."

But, I pointed out, he, as a tourist in Lanzarote, had done precisely what he was saying holidaymakers didn't do.

"That's because the wife and meself have decided inflation here is too high," he replied.

"We can rent out our place, get a one-bedroom apartment on the beach out there and live better without having to do more than part-time jobs."

Consumerism + an unregulated market = emigration. It's the new math.