A tribute to greed

Please allow me to jog the memory of the owner of that pavement café at the Ferries in Sliema and similarly of that café in Rabat who found my nephew, his wife and three children an easy target for overcharging. The Sliema swindler charged €25 and the one in Rabat €18 for the same order of four soft drinks and a small bottle of water.

Do these heartless individuals not realise the damage their thieving practice does to the tourist industry? How heartless can you be, when a man with a wife and three children satisfies the demands of his family on a hot day, by charging at least five times the normal price? I hope these persons or similar café owners will not write in to justify this abuse of Maltese hospitality by claiming expenses on overheads or on staff wages in the high season. These café premises do very well and some close entirely during the shoulder months affording them a five-month year and enjoyment of the rest of the year.

In spite of regulations stipulating that all prices must be shown, it is clear that in most instances these are ignored and a tourist has no benefit of complaint to a responsible source especially when no enforcement of regulations continues to provide bad publicity to the industry.