Way back in November of 2011 I published a blog post entitiled "The two G’s – Gullible and Greedy", and a couple of days ago I had to do some research that backs up just how greedy many South Africans are. I still have an old cell phone - a Nokia 6020 - which has served me well over the years. I'll wait until I get to the States before upgrading, for reasons that will become obvious by the end of this post. About a week ago I noticed that I was having to charge the battery on my phone every day. Obviously, I thought, the battery was packing up and I would need to replace it. So I started doing some research and discovered the same battery priced at £3-68 in the UK - that's about R46 at today's exchange rate.
I started looking for the same battery here in South Africa - the first website I went to ( pricecheck.co.za ) listed the battery at R421 - wow that's a 900% increase. Two other websites I checked were R262 ( bluestream.co.za ) and R283 (phoneextreme.co.za ) only 570% increase on the UK price. Now when you consider that all of the batteries, whether here or in the UK, are manufactured in China, how on Earth can those SA prices be warranted? There should be government legislation preventing such blatant profiteering.
As it happened I didn't need to purchase a replacement battery. Liz suggested switching off the phone and removing the battery, which I did. I placed it back in the phone and recharged it. Guess what! The phone has remained fully charged for 4 days, and shows none of those original symptoms. Thanks Liz - gonna miss you after Tuesday.
