Latest / Early Edition with Ryan Bridge / Ryan Bridge: Why are we paying $80 a year for a bin no one uses?

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Ryan Bridge: Why are we paying $80 a year for a bin no one uses? · Early Edition with Ryan Bridge

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: So based on the calculations that I have done on
• 0:02
  Speaker 1: the back of an envelope, which you probably shouldn't trust.
• 0:04
  Speaker 1: But according to the grocery don't want to call them winges,
• 0:09
  Speaker 1: but the people the group who are upset about the
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: monopoly duopoly that's happening in our grocery sector, you could
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: save at most per person about seventy four dollars per
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: year if they were to have perfect competition in the sector,
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: which obviously would be very hard to achieve. Do you
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: know what else costs you eighty dollars a year. A
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: friend and I were chatting at the gym the other
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: day and he showed me his rates bill, which he'd
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: kindly brought to the gym to encourage him to run faster. Anyway,
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: there's an eighty dollar targeted rate for the food compost bin.
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: And he said what's that for? And I was like,
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: it's the green bin that's on the street that no
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: one uses. Then he was running faster than I've ever
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: seen him run on the treadmill. Anyway, So apparently sixty
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: to sixty five percent of us don't use them. And
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: if you walk down this is the food scrapspin. They
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: know they have them in other parts of the country.
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: In Auckland we've only got just recently, so we're all
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: getting a bit used to them. But eighty dollars a
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: year is what you have to pay. And I got
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: quite angry when I thought about, because we were talking
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: if you're on a fixed income, eighty dollars a year
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: is a lot of money. If you're a pensioner and
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: you cannot opt out of this service, who else can
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: charge you for a service that you don't want or need.
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: What about a pensioner who's you know, does her own
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: or hurt his own composting in the backyard. They can't
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: opt out of it. They have to have this bin
• 1:30
  Speaker 1: and they have to pay eighty dollars per year for
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: the privilege. It's like your barber sending like a barber
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: giving a lady a bed trimmer and saying, here, I'm
• 1:40
  Speaker 1: going to charge you for that. I don't need it.
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: Oh well you have to have it? Why? Just cause?
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: And you know what, they're all made of plastic, these bins.
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: So how's that for the environment. For more from News Talks'
• 1:52
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• 1:56
  Speaker 1: shows with you wherever you go with our podcasts on
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: IR Radio