Dear Hannah, Thank you for your generic yet polite response. I will take each point in turn as I have not yet crafted a generic response to your response. But judging by the number of unhappy present and former ALDI customers showing an interest in this issue on facebook and moneysavingexpert, I suspect a generic response will be crafted in due course. Firstly, there is no need to thank me for my e-mail. I am highly skeptical that any gratitude for my complaint exists. I would warm more to you if you had began with oh god, not you as well.... or ive read your moan, now ive got to be polite.... although I appreciate that many customers would be incensed by such honesty. Secondly, you refer to the letter we have received as a parking charge notice. I would clarify that in the eyes of the law this letter is merely an attempted and unjustified invoice, therefore your term, which deliberately or otherwise, likens it to a penalty charge notice which one might receive from a council officer, is disingenuous. From now on we will refer to the letter as the invoice. I would at this point make clear that it is an invoice for services which nobody with access to my car has requested or consented to, and the terms and payment for those services is as unclear now as it was at the time of, regrettably, using ALDI for our shopping. Furthermore, I reject totally the idea that a reasonable charge for 26 minutes parking in your car park (the car was, retrospectively, legitimately parked for 90minutes on parking eyes and ALDIs unclear and unfair terms as set out in the invoice) could be £40/£70. This amounts to £1.54/£3.08 per minute, which i regard as unfairly and exorbitantly priced. This leads me on to your third point. Your hope that i can appreciate the need to have a car park management system to ensure the provision of car parking to all our customers. it was Nietzsche who said hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man, so with that in mind, i will make the following points; We were ALDI customers, our car was parked in your shop car park. You have bitten the hand which, in part, feeds you. In so doing you directly punish your own customers. I am sure you dont need me to tell you that the list of disenfranchised ALDI customers who have fallen foul of this issue is long. Car parks should be for the customers, but by entering into a service agreement with Parking Eye, ALDI is promoting greed, fear and torment of its customers. It isnt the ability of private companies to issue tickets in itself thats a problem. Its the unstructured system which puts unnecessary power in potentially unscrupulous hands. Private car park operators exploit the uninformed consumers fear of legal liability using quasi-criminal, threatening literature. It is often, sadly, the vulnerable and elderly who pay up to avoid threatened further action. I hope you agree that this is unethical. While I have my book of quotes open, hope is such a bait it covers any hook (Oliver Goldsmith... i dont know either). It must be established here that any claim is under the law of contract, rather than the tort of trespass (see case of Excel Parking Services v Alan Matthews, Wrexham County Court, May 2009 where the parking company lost on this ground). It must be established that the parking company has sufficient interest in the land to bring a claim (see case of VCS v. HM Revenue & Customs, Upper Tax Tribunal, a binding decision at the level of the High Court) in which it was decided that unless the PPC has a proprietary interest in the land they are not able to offer contracts for parking. It must be established that all of the elements of a contract (offer, acceptance, consideration) are present. Charges must be a genuine pre-estimate of loss, or actual damages caused by trespass (see the Department of Transports guidance on the Protection of Freedoms Act). Legally, the amount charged has to relate to a calculation of the loss to the landowner. ALDI could claim for lost income if a space that someone else could have paid for and used was occupied, but only if the car park was full and there were no parking spaces left. I look forward to your detailed breakdown of the loss ALDI sustained in those 26 minutes. Any contract must not fall foul of the Unfair Contract Terms Act and associated regulations. It is not the purpose of civil contracts to punish or penalize, that is the role of criminal law. Any contractual term that seeks to do so (even assuming the contract is implicitly formed with perfect signage...obviously not) is rendered void and unenforceable by common law and statute (Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts Regulations 1999). A brief look around social networking sites shows a large number of ALDI customers voicing their concerns regarding these invoices, but I have yet to find one single complaint on any social network regarding congestion in ALDI car parks due to people parking in a perceptibly inappropriate manner. What is the real motive for this PPC agreement? In your next paragraph, you assume my awareness (quite rightly) of the company that ALDI has gone into cahoots with for car park management. There is little I can say about this other than well done. I find the denouement of this paragraph insulting however, for the same reasons has Ive highlighted above. I contend that your agreement with Parking Eye does not set out to ensure free customer parking (our free parking cost £40/£70!!) but instead, if truth be told, sets out to ensure a healthy profit for Parking Eye and a tidy little cut for ALDI. As I reached the final part of your e-mail I will admit that my enthusiasm was waning and I was beginning to lose interest. Imagine therefore my renewed stamina and reinvigorated eagerness which immediately overcame me reading of your encouragement to appeal the invoice. Encouragement is the key ingredient in all positive professional and personal relationships (Dinkmeyer, D., & Losoncy, L. (1996). The skills of encouragement. Delray Beach, FL: St. Lucie Press.) so I thank you for this. Although in moderation, I would admit that I have, it may surprise you, already lodged an appeal. (During, and at the end of your words of encouragement you refer to the invoice as a charge. This took the shine off a nice gesture. Policemen and angry elephants charge.) In September this year, Matthew Barnes and Roman Heini (great name, reminds me of Austin Powers dont touch my heini baby), ALDIs joint managing directors, said, and i quote; You can call us a consumer champion ...... Customers have come to see ALDI as a business they can trust, potentially in a market where there is very much a lack of trust. Im a sucker for a quote, as you will by now realise. But this one made me spit my PG tips back into the cup (i tried ALDI own brand but the dog put me off...https://youtube/watch?v=uCKgCkubGc0); The following extract from thisismoney website has a poorly placed apostrophe and lacks a comma but is nonetheless interesting; The pair are so in tune they finish each others (sic) sentences (no comma) decamp into the front of a black Mercedes saloon to drive the short distance to the company headquarters (thisismoney.co.uk, july 2014). Presumably they couldnt leave the black mercedes saloon in the shop car park and walk the short distance in case Parking Eye sent them an invoice? I feel I have diverted from your letter. OK, next up, receipts. One of the things I had always found slightly inexplicable and yet fascinating about ALDI was that it had a reputation of being a supermarket which did not accept cards. Upon doing further research after our first shopping trip to ALDI Great Barr, I discovered that ALDI did in fact accept debit cards, just not credit cards. Take for example the heartfelt, yet poorly spelt, shock of Ms. Karlaine Young on facebook (https://facebook/AldiUK/posts/517222788338528), who says; Why dont you take credit cards? I done £35 of shopping only to be told sorry we dont take credit cards! It was a good job my son and I had some cash or it could have been very embarrasing for me and annoying for the people behind me!(sad yellow face) (SIC) Nonetheless the reputation stuck, and as such we have always been in the habit of preparing cash for our 3 ALDI trips to date so you will see why it will not be possible for us to supply you with receipts or bank account statements to prove our custom. I think we do however have some photographs of s enjoying the ambiance, which I will send to you in due course. I am a skeptic at heart, but now there are rumblings of conspiracy theories in my head regarding a general lack of card receipts and ALDI customers needing these for appealing against Parking Eye invoices. Maybe Ive been writing this e-mail for too long!! Kind Regards,
Posted on: Thu, 23 Oct 2014 13:22:14 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015