Pay & Display Stealing Money

uktim29

mute_posting wrote: »

Do you always have the exact change for every procuct or service you purchase ajax?

Actually when I'm planning on paying for parking or know I'm driving and there will be a toll for a bridge I will carry change so I'll be able to pay the exact amount.

Is planning ahead really that uncommon?

Bamber19

mute_posting wrote: »

You've possibly missed the point - if you went into a leisure centre and the court rates were £4 and you paid with £5 note you would expect change (not an extension of court time)

I'm pretty sure the OP has said that the lack of change is not the issue, they seem to jsut think that the set half hourly rate should be changed to a by the second rate dependant on how many coppers they can tip into the machine in a "I've paid £3.61, i demand the per second value" sort of way.

mute_posting wrote: »

I've never called it theft, the OP did to vent his frustration as a consumer (hmmmm - now where on this page have I seen those words before?????)

I still fail to see why you think the words consumer and vent together translates to "everyone must agree or keep silent, having an opposing opinion to the poster is simply not allowed." Yes this board is for consumer vents but it doesn't bar people from putting forth their opinion on a thread and it'd frankly be a pointless area of the forum if it just went "XYZ happened and i was annoyed" "I agree" "yes" "me too" especially considering some of the ridiculous claims about non-existant rights we have on these boards(not on this thread) someone needs to let people know when they're in the wrong.

To give an example, on a football forum, there is perhaps an area for Cardiff City fans and an area for Man U fans, if a Man U fan sees a thread on the Cardiff section saying "Earnshaw is ten times the player Cristiano Ronaldo is," there's surely nothing objectionable in said Man U fan going in and putting forward his opinion that this guy is a lunatic and that Earnshaw is a poor man's Ali Dia.(Which of course Southampton fans could then join in and comment on)

mute_posting

Bamber19 wrote: »

I'm pretty sure the OP has said that the lack of change is not the issue, they seem to jsut think that the set half hourly rate should be changed to a by the second rate dependant on how many coppers they can tip into the machine in a "I've paid £3.61, i demand the per second value" sort of way.

I think you miss-read that, as I recall the suggestion they made was that if they overpaid a £1.80 charge with say 2 £1 coins a pro-rata'd ticket could be issued (as they have met the minimum payment).

Perhaps the machines around your way are different to the ones around here because ours don't accept coppers?

I still fail to see why you think the words consumer and vent together translates to "everyone must agree or keep silent, having an opposing opinion to the poster is simply not allowed." Yes this board is for consumer vents but it doesn't bar people from putting forth their opinion on a thread and it'd frankly be a pointless area of the forum if it just went "XYZ happened and i was annoyed" "I agree" "yes" "me too" especially considering some of the ridiculous claims about non-existant rights we have on these boards(not on this thread) someone needs to let people know when they're in the wrong.

I agree, people should have opnions but many of the posts on this thread have wheeled out frankly irrelevant comparrisons, whilst others, have managed to create sensible debate (perhaps not agreeing with OP) - is just very surprising some of the PoV on a Money Saving Website

To give an example, on a football forum, there is perhaps an area for Cardiff City fans and an area for Man U fans, if a Man U fan sees a thread on the Cardiff section saying "Earnshaw is ten times the player Cristiano Ronaldo is," there's surely nothing objectionable in said Man U fan going in and putting forward his opinion that this guy is a lunatic and that Earnshaw is a poor man's Ali Dia.(Which of course Southampton fans could then join in and comment on)

You'll have to forgive me on this last bit, I don't watch football at all so all I see is blah blah blah, blah blah.

MP

Bamber19

mute_posting wrote: »

Perhaps the machines around your way are different to the ones around here because ours don't accept coppers?

Perhaps the next thread can be "why wont the machines round my way take coppers" then, it's as valid, or in-valid a complaint as the one at hand.

mute_posting wrote: »

I think you miss-read that, as I recall the suggestion they made was that if they overpaid a £1.80 charge with say 2 £1 coins a pro-rata'd ticket could be issued (as they have met the minimum payment).

But Harry also said this:

HarryV wrote: »

I have no objection to it not giving me change. As I have explained above it should give you the correct amount of time for the money you put in.

The only reason I brought it up was because you rejected someone's comparison to a squash court on the grounds that you can get change there, whereas Harry has stated change isn't the issue so in fact hiring a court for an hour and only using it for a half hour and expecting half your money back when there is a set hourly rate not a per minute rate is completely related and analogous to this situation.

I know it's hard to accept but if the company sells time at a half hourly rate why should one expect to be able to get 2 hours 36 minutes of parking on a pro-rata basis, if you work like that it is actually inevitable that the next complaint is what i suggested above, albeit not seriously, because someone will want the machine to accept 2's and 1's so that they can add 6p in in order to get an extra minute of parking, a line simply needed to be drawn and it has been.

uktim29

mute_posting wrote: »

Perhaps the machines around your way are different to the ones around here because ours don't accept coppers?

But what difference would that make anyway? The charge is 3p a minute. Unless you want a period of time or part period of time of less than 2 minutes then you wouldn't need the machine to take coppers!

ajaxgeezer

mute_posting wrote: »

Clearly they are necessary as you still appear to be questioning the purpose of the board.

... in what way? The only person questioning anything is you - you're questioning the council's right to have their rules, or that is how it seems.

Mark7799

Bamber19 wrote: »

I still fail to see why you think the words consumer and vent together translates to "everyone must agree or keep silent, having an opposing opinion to the poster is simply not allowed." Yes this board is for consumer vents but it doesn't bar people from putting forth their opinion on a thread and it'd frankly be a pointless area of the forum if it just went "XYZ happened and i was annoyed" "I agree" "yes" "me too" especially considering some of the ridiculous claims about non-existant rights we have on these boards(not on this thread) someone needs to let people know when they're in the wrong.

To give an example, on a football forum, there is perhaps an area for Cardiff City fans and an area for Man U fans, if a Man U fan sees a thread on the Cardiff section saying "Earnshaw is ten times the player Cristiano Ronaldo is," there's surely nothing objectionable in said Man U fan going in and putting forward his opinion that this guy is a lunatic and that Earnshaw is a poor man's Ali Dia.(Which of course Southampton fans could then join in and comment on)

:rotfl: :rotfl: :rotfl:

HarryV

Right you lot:

As many people have observed, this website is full of trolls who automatically contradict whatever the original poster has said or asked; and more often than not, post "suggestions" which attempt to make them seem clever. Inevitably it has the reverse effect. Simply by looking back over the poster's history, and the sheer volume of their postings will confirm this. Usually they haven't managed to undersand the gist of the original post or have been distracted by a throw-away comment or phrase and missed the point.

My original compaint was that as the parking is calculated electronically there is no logical reason, other than the council's deliberate choice, why parking time can't be rounded to the nearest minute, or even five minutes, which would be better than half an hour.

It was not about giving change and it's not about coppers for whoever it was that brought that up!

The council choose to sell it in half-hour units and that is my point. Why? It is not as if they are selling cans of drink, £1.80 per can and if I put in £2 obviously I wouldn't expect the machine to dribble out a little extra.

It is not a case of planning ahead and having multiples of 90p in loose change available. I might want 1h 15min hours of parking which would cost £2.25. If I have £2.25 why can't I buy 1h 15min. Apart from "the council doesn't want you to" there is no reason. This is (again for those of you who missed it) the point of my original post.

It can't be beyond technology nowadays to work this out. If they can put up the prices by 20p per hour as they did recently (an increase of 12.5%, nice work if you can get it) why can't the blasted machine work out, to the nearest minute, how much parking to issue. Because the council doesn't want it to.

In the old days of parking meters, it was 20p for 6 minutes for instance, and you just put in 20p pieces and incremented your time by six minute intervals. No problem. Why we should suddenly go to 30 minute intervals is beyond me.

The use of the phrase "stealing my money" was obviously not meant literally. Although theft is defined as "the illegal taking of another person's property without that person's freely-given consent. Well I can safely say my consent was not given freely, it was given reluctantly.

HarryV

ajaxgeezer wrote: »

As I just said, if it's simply a case of the original post not being easy to read then it's a bit boring to me. I'll wait to see if he meant it first or whether he didn't.

Virtually everyone else managed to get my original post!

Do I understand you correctly but you think things are boring if you don't find them easy to read? :rotfl:

HarryV

trisontana wrote: »

Frankly I can't see any difference between those parking machines which only allow fixed periods of time, and something like booking a squash court, where you pay for an hour's use, only play for half an hour, and then demand your money back for the unused time.

The squash court would not be able to administer its booking system if you could buy exactly the amount of time you required. So they sell in convenient one-hour slots so that everyone knows the score. Parking spaces do not need to be administered in the same way.

Also we accept that we book a court for an hour we pay for an hour, just like you book a cinema ticket and can't ask for a refund if you leave half way through.

However there are things that can be bought in units small enough to be convenient or fair. For instance we as consumers fought to get per-second billing on telephones. Shall we go back to the old days where you were charged by the minute? So if your call was 1m01sec you paid for 2 mins?

Or perhaps you go into your hardware store to buy some electrical cable. You need 1.5m but the shop-keeper says you can only have 1m or 2m. Would you accept being oversold and buy the 2m when you didn't need it?

Or how about a greengrocer who only sold by the whole kg, didn't give change and rounded DOWN the weight of goods you bought?

Some things lend themselves to smaller units of purchase and others don't.

Buying time calculated by a machine and printed on a ticket is the easiest thing to sell by the minute according to the money you put in.