back to menuA picture on the front of "The Plymouth Consumer" shows "Derry's Tower", a clock now hidden away, leaning over at an alarming angle. The sundial in the rebuilt city centre proved unpopular and repeatedly citizens of Plymouth ask for the clock to be moved to replace it. By the magic of digital photography the Group has done this, bending the tower so it too can act as a sundial!
Have you noticed an unfamiliar milk product on supermarket shelves called ‘breakfast milk’? What on earth is it? I avoided investigating because of an unfortunate misreading the first time I saw it, but I now know, thanks to an investigation by Plymouth Group, that it is equivalent to Channel Islands milk and is one of the few types of milk not homogenised.
The investigation was into milk prices, and Breakfast Milk was found to be about twice the price of ordinary milk at 42.5p per pint (56p for 750m1.) or 45p if delivered by your friendly milk man. In supermarkets the average price of homogenised milk was found to be 27p per pint, but this dropped as you bought bigger and bigger containers, down to 2l.25 p for a six pint container.
Milk delivered cost about 40p per pint, so you do pay quite a lot for convenience.
Plymouth Group carried out a survey of prices for vegetables in the city and in Tavistock and found that small shops and markets were usually cheapest. They found it difficult to check on quality.
One particular advantage of the smaller shops and markets was that bananas were usually more ready to eat than those in supermarkets. They also compared the taste and prices of coffee and concluded that, for instant coffee, price and quality are clearly related. They also said that decaffeinated coffee no longer tasted inferior to normal coffee.
It is concerning that some products with a very identifiable regional link (and taste) seem to be made in many other places. Do they lose their distinctive character? So called ‘Melton Mowbray’ pies spring to mind, but there are others, Brie cheese for instance. Perhaps the most universal is Cheddar Cheese, which seems to be made all over the world.
Thanks to Bath Group’s most recent Newsletter I have discovered that provided the cheese is made using the unique "cheddaring process" it can be called Cheddar, no matter where it is made.
The cheese was not made in Cheddar anyway, but on neighbouring farms and then brought to the Cheddar caves for maturing, where the temperature and humidity were both ideal for the task. The process of "cheddaring" refers to the way the firming curds are cut, folded and stacked to get rid of whey to form a condensed product to be milled, slated and pressed into moulds.
No, I don’t know what ‘slating’ is either!
Bath Group conducted a Cheddar Cheese survey in a dozen different supermarkets.
All stocked several varieties - Waitrose had 21 (!) on display at the time of the visit. Stocks did vary from time to time. It was not always easy, says Bath Group, to find out where the cheese was made, as opposed to packaged. Some were obvious, but others had a very small logo with UK or EC on them and some were just marked ‘imported’. All should have displayed the address of the packing company or producer.
The more mature Cheddars were much more expensive than the mild ones, as one would expect. There was not much to choose between the supermarkets but Aldi and Lidi (more warehouses than supermarkets) were much cheaper and their cheeses had no country of origin shown.
One supermarket’s idea of mild Cheddar, however was another’s mature and the word ‘vintage’ seemed to be applied loosely; Anchor cheese comes in three ‘vintages’, 24 months, 14 months, and 8 months old. Some supermarkets had a strength numbering system but the Group concluded that any taste or strength indicator was only a guide, and suggested going to the delicatessen counter and asking for a taste before buying.
The Group discovered to their surprise that in some supermarkets smaller packs were more expensive than larger ones of the same cheese. In one case the packs were only marked with the pack price and not the price per kg. They considered this was misleading. The price per kg should be shown clearly on all packs of cheese.
However people in wheel chairs still want to get about in Bath and the Group carried out a very comprehensive, and critical survey of access throughout the city, which appears in the Spring Newsletter. Margaret Rowden promises a follow up in the next issue.
Also in the Spring issue is a comprehensive list of chemists who provide help for disabled people. This most useful list could well be copied by other Groups.
It it is five years since Guernsey Consumer group was set up and in that time it has had an enormous effect on the life of the Island, says their Annual Report.
How many other Consumer Groups can say that about the community on which they are centred?
The Guernsey Group, however is far from satisfied at progress. There are still no "user groups" for the utilities and the Guernsey States Departments rarely sees any reason to indulge in public consultation when formulating policy.
However, the Group does have excellent connections with the "States" (Guernsey’s government) as two members of the Executive Committee are Guernsey MPs (Deputies)!
In October last year "Which?" contained an article about car hire firms discriminating against older drivers.
They concluded that discriminating against someone purely on age did not make sense in the UK where measures are in place to help ensure that older people are competent.
Tyneside Group decided to investigate the position and chose, at random, twelve car hire firms and inquired about minimum and maximum age limitations.
None of the firms would hire a car to anyone under twenty one.
Twenty one year olds were catered for by two firms, hiring exclusively VW (only Polos for the 21 year olds) and Ford cars.
Twenty three or twenty five was the minimum age in most of the other cases but Budget Rent-a-car would hire to a twenty two year old who had held a clean licence for two years. The others also required a clean licence, held for two or three years.
Rent-a-Banger Car Hire of Whitley Bay was, perhaps surprisingly in view of its name, the most conservative with regard to both older and younger drivers, requiring a minimum age of 25 and a maximum of 69.
Avis and Budget Rent-a-Car had no top limit; most of the others restricted their hiring to those aged 70 or less, though two said 75 and one, the exclusively VW hirer, would hire to an 80 year old.
For both young (over 21 anyway) and old, the message is ‘shop around’ and you will find someone to hire to you, but it might take a number of phone calls to do so.
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