Edinburgh Chairman Hamish Henderson has a grouse. He bought a large scale map of a rapidly developing area of England. When he used it to go for a walk, he found it had been printed over five years ago and none of the new roads on which he was walking were drawn. It was, he wrote, about as useful as a Victorian Ordinance Survey reprint would be for finding out the route of the M25, but ideal for finding the names of the woods and farms that had disappeared.
Why, he asks, do not map printers put the date or period of the relevant survey prominently on the front cover? He vows that he will not be embarrassed when next purchasing a map by opening it right out and playing "hunt the date" before parting with his money.
Many readers of Consumer News will know Mary Paterson, the Honorary Secretary of Edinburgh Consumer Group and former Executive Member. Some may be wondering about her, not having heard her name mentioned recently. She went to Australia for a holiday last year, got married and returned as Mary Nisbet! Congratulations are very much in order, also the old 'Players Theatre' question "how does it feel to be the right way up?" Mary has recently been appointed as lay member on the Independent Review Panel for NHS Complaints Procedures.
A small number of Edinburgh Group members saw the production side of mass daily publishing which incorporates high quality colour, glossy magazines and brightly coloured inserts.
It all starts with huge rolls of newsprint which are fed continuously into giant printing machines. The newsprint for newspapers costs £350 per tonne whether recycled in Bridgewater or from sustainable forests in Canada. Higher quality newsprint for magazines comes from Norway.
The machines never stop. Copies of "The Scotsman", "Scotland on Sunday", the "Evening News" and various editions of the "Herald & Post" flow off continuously at the staggering rate of 56,000 copies an hour!
Material, in page format, is received electronically from the editorial departments some miles away. Huge negatives in final page sizes are produced for each of three colours and black. From these, images are made on flexible plates which are then set up for continuous offset printing.
The newspapers are assembled from several printing lines which converge. The assembly machines cut and fold into newspapers and can automatically insert the junk mail, or weekend magazine, Which always falls out when you least want it to. The latest of the assembly machines cost £3.5 million.
Once assembled the papers are bundled up and sent out in a large fleet of vans, all over Scotland. A few even filter into England.
A casual question by a Guernsey politician of Guernsey Group Chairman Roy Bisson set off a nationwide survey! The question - "Can you find out how much milk costs in England?" Roy realised that this was an ideal use of the Group consultation process and posted off questionnaires to Group Secretaries forthwith. Within hours the returns began to come in, and within 10 days the whole operation was complete.
Why the question? Well, in Guernsey (home of the golden breed) the price of liquid milk is set by statute, currently 89p per litre, and laws inhibit the importation of milk from elsewhere. As a result, farmers don't want to grow anything but cows, and milk production now far outstrips demand. Other locally produced dairy products that use up any excess milk, e.g. cheese, yogurt and cream, are having to be produced at a loss because they have no price protection.
The politician has his answer, Islanders still pay a high price for milk, but the exercise has now triggered-off a number of UK surveys of a detailed nature!
A member of the Bromley and District Consumer Group reports in "Watchdog", the Group's magazine, that his campaign for later mail collection has met with success.
There are now 6.30 pm collections at both post offices in his locality and all the local post boxes are emptied at 6.15 pm.
He says "I think it is quite outstanding and Royal Mail deserves praise for such positive action".
It also shows that it pays to campaign.
Plymouth and District Consumer Group tried out South West Water's Helpline
A member's query about a water meter elicited the number of South West Water's helpline, and a hollow laugh!
The editor of "The Plymouth Consumer" tried the number 15 times over a three-week period and got through twice.
The battle for market share suddenly turned local in Exeter.
At the entrance to an Exeter Tesco store were found four large boxes. Two contained forty items bought at Tesco and the other two contained identical, or near identical, items bought at Sainsbury.
The bills for both assortments were displayed, £57.58 at Sainsbury and £54.66 at Tesco, a saving by buying them at Tesco of £2.92. Since then Tesco has promised even more price cuts.
A concerned Exeter consumer pointed out that on the label of Tesco's Extra Chunky Minestrone Soup one of the ingredients was maize starch* - marked with an asterisk.
If you look several lines further down you discover that the asterisk (it you noticed it at all) meant genetically modified.
This particular nightmare is not peculiar to Exeter but has been uncovered by the Exeter and District Consumer Group and highlighted in their magazine "EXCHECKER".
Since last October, and with minimum publicity, the Passport Office has decided that children must have their own passports. Thus a mother renewing her own passport, which costs £21, now finds that she has to buy three new passports, at £11 each, for her three children who were, previously, part of her passport.
The Passport Office is not user-friendly either, according to the EXCHECKER author. Forms that the poor harassed mother has to fill in must be absolutely correct in every detail, such as not allowing your signature to stray outside the too small box provided. Such an indiscretion will invalidate the application, says the message on the form.
The children's passports, of course, have photographs. So mother takes baby into the booth, but baby is fractious and she does not pull back the coloured curtain and the result is a photo with a coloured background - that also invalidates the application.
You can ring up the Passport Office for advice, but callers find that they spend a long time hanging on, which, on the 0870 number, costs 8p per minute.
The Passport Office might suggest that you seek help in checking your application at one or other of their high street agents, such as Lloyds Bank or a main Post Office. These agents charge £3.20 for the service but, in the case of the Post Office, and possibly Lloyds Bank as well, that includes sending off your passport application for you in a secure package.
If you are in a panic and have to have a new passport very quickly you can go to the Passport Office and have your application dealt with that day - at an extra charge of £10.
The Passport Office carries a Charter Mark on its information leaflet. Do you think it deserves it?
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