Friday, February 27th, 2009 at 1:13 pm
I’m all for saving money where possible and it makes a lot of sense for airlines to reduce costs where possible but I do sometimes wonder if the world is going mad. Michael O’Leary the CEO of Ryan Air has said that one of the options they are considering is to charge up to a pound for using toilets on their aircraft.
He points out that by doing so they could reduce the basic cost of flights, which may be the case, but I suspect they would sell a lot fewer cups of coffee and other drinks. Why pay a couple of pounds for a cup of coffee when it will cost you another pound to relieve yourself of it an hour or two later?
Cost cutting to remove waste, no pun intended, does make sense but when you get to the point that you are quite literally causing your customers to suffer to save money I think that is a step too far and I don’t even like to think about the possibility that someone, in their attempts to wait until they get to the terminal toilets on landing, might get caught short. Would you want to be the next passenger in that seat?
Thursday, February 26th, 2009 at 2:54 pm
It has been a long time coming but at long last we have a ruling from the appeal court about penalty bank charges. This was the court case where the banking industry was hoping to prove that the way they apply bank charges was beyond the control of the Office Of Fair Trading.
Common sense and justice seems to have prevailed and the ruling is that the OFT does have the right to consider the fairness of the bank charges imposed on customers by the banks. The bad news is that apparently the banks want now to ask the law lords for leave to appeal against the result of the appeal just announced.
If you had any lingering feelings of sympathy or admiration for bankers after the problems the financial industry has caused us all over the last year or so then this surely proves they are beneath contempt and hardly deserve the right to be called human. They have gone to great efforts to prove that they are the lowest form of life on the planet and have succeeded admirably.
They clearly lack morals or any sense of justice, which must surely be two key elements of being considered a normal human being.
The government have been disappointing in this regard as well. There was clearly a moral issue here and the government should have made clear that if the law did not establish that the OFT could rule on the fairness of banking charges then it would be changed to ensure that it did.
The banks have argued all along that they are providing a service to the customer when they allow payments to be made over and above any previously agreed overdraft. In most cases customers would rather the bank did not make the payment which is often far less than the amount of charges the bank then applies to the bank account which, of course, causes further problems for the customer the banks claim they are trying to help.
It is time this was brought to an end and customers, who after all are the electorate, are considered
as important as the greedy and selfish people who seem to be running the banking industry.
Monday, February 23rd, 2009 at 12:11 pm
Do you want to get a new mortgage? The news that Northern Rock is about to start lending again to the tune of £14 billion is good news for the housing market and most likely good for the economy as well. The question is whether there are the potential buyers out there looking to buy houses.
After months of falls in the value of property nobody knows how much further that might continue and if most people think that it will, they might be unwilling to commit to buy right now. There is the additional problem that with the economy balanced so precariously people are concerned about their prospects for the future and the possibility of suddenly finding themselves unemployed and their income reduced.
The Northern Rock mortgages will help improve availability of mortgages and it may signal a start to turning things around. There are many people who do feel secure in their jobs and will be ready to buy houses and it may be that we are nearing the bottom of the slump and it could be a good time to be buying but there are many questions and few answers right now.
