Bajans Paying a High Price:
No Questions Asked

The complacency of Barbadians when it comes to consumer rights is astounding. It seems like we have gone into a mode of silently complaining, silently paying and silently suffering.

I overheard a lady asking her friend for bus fare. She had just come out of a doctor's office. From the conversation between them, it seems that the doctor told her she was OK and the pain was due to something she ate but it was not critical.

She had saved the eighty dollars, sacrificing lunch money and bills to pay the doctor. She told her friend that she works for less than $200 per week and has two children.

A mother of four went to a popular department store and took out a computer on credit which was advertised in a brochure the company circulated. When she got home she found that the computer was not the same as what was advertised and had less power.

She also found that she was charged more than what was in the brochure. Further there was VAT on the computer which should not be and over a period of days felt that she was being shortchanged. She decided to return it and to her surprise when she got to the store the store charged her five percent of the value as an unpacking fee.

A man told the unfortunate tale of making a deposit to his bank account at an ATM on a Friday evening after banking hours. He proceeded to write cheques over the weekend and thought nothing of it until a week later when he received a notice from the bank telling him that three of his cheques were returned for insufficient funds.

On querying this with the bank, he was told that it takes five working days to clear a cheque once it was deposited at the ATM and when the cheques he wrote were presented to his bank for payment on the following Wednesday his account had no funds on it and the cheque he deposited needed another two days before it could be cleared. The bank charged him thirty five dollars.

Another gentleman received a cheque on a Thursday. Proceeded to write cheques but did not get to the bank to make the deposit until the following Monday.

After making his deposit just after 8 a.m. on the Monday morning, he got a call from the bank stating that there was insufficient funds on his account and was being asked to make a deposit. He said that he was in the bank as soon as it was opened and had made a deposit.

A few days later he got a notice from the bank informing him that they deducted an overdraft fee of $30.00 from his account because when the first cheque came insufficient funds were on his account.

He queried the overdraft fee because by the time he got the call from the bank he had already deposited the money. He pointed out that the bank could not have used their funds to clear the cheque because he cleared the cheque when he made the deposit. Why then is he being charged an overdraft fee?

A friend found himself with a cell phone bill of over a thousand dollars and as he was counting his coppers to go and pay the bill, he was encouraged by a close friend to find out from the company why his bill was so high.

His friend took him to the company only to find out that he was being billed twice and that he was not being charged according to the package which he requested. It turned out that his real bill was less than two hundred and fifty dollars.

The questions to be answered are:

Why does a doctor (GP) charge between sixty and eighty dollars just for a visit and earns that without touching the patient? It means that a doctor who sees 50 patients a day will earn a minimum of $3000.00 per day without putting out anything.

How many people went to a store to purchase or credit items advertised at one price and paid or agree to pay a higher price for goods that are inferior to that which was advertised?

Why would a bank charge thirty to thirty-five dollars for handling a cheque which bounced but only twenty cents for one which did not bounce? Is the bank taking the law into its own hands? Are they collecting fines? Why then are these fines not paid into the Consolidated Fund as is required by the Law Courts?

Why do banks not notify their customers when their service charges go up? Why is it that only a bank can deduct money from your account forthwith without sending you a bill and allowing you to budget for it and pay for it as you would any other bill?

Why are we paying twenty-eight dollars a month for unlimited use of a landline but nearly twice that amount for only one hundred and fifty minutes per month on a cell phone?

This article only just cracked the top of the barrel. There are many more instances where consumers are paying and businesses are simply collecting. It seems like we have gone into a syndrome of paying exorbitant prices.

Most of us pass it off by saying, "If you want it you pay for it." This is not good enough. This can only make the cost of living spiral and create an environment of artificial inflation.

Prices are no longer tied to costs by percentage but what the seller wants to get out of it in order to afford goods and services at the inflated rates. Many Bajans are now seen in Trinidad where the prices are so reasonable that even with air fare and accommodation it is far cheaper than shopping in Barbados .

It is for this reason that BANGO has established a Consumer Enquiries and Complaints Desk and we encourage consumers to use it.

Roosevelt O. King
Secretary General
admin@bango.org.bb