Saturday, April 09, 2011
Tescos
Off to Tesco's Leatherhead yesterday to check up where my complaint about flies in the red lentils had got to, the complaint having been made on 19th October last. Oh, said the helpful lady at customer services. You should have had a reply long ago, maybe 5 weeks or so after the original complaint. Do you have any record of the complaint? No, we wipe them at the beginning of the year. But you can phone head office she says, proffering a slip of paper on which she had written a telephone number. Maybe I will let it go this time, and next time the flies appear try the Sainsbury's customer service people.
Then off to the beer aisle where I find that the choice of bottled English beer is not that good. But manage to find a dozen or so Pedigree and make it up to a round 20 with Spitfire, having duly clocked the ticket which says 4 for £5. Approximately a third of the price at your average pub, although the Epsom Slug & Lettuce ought to be mentioned in dispatches for selling Bombardier at £2 or thereabouts; more or less Wetherspoons' prices.
I then thought to demonstrate to FIL the wonders of self checkout. Start feeding the bottles through. Have to wait for supervisor to authorise me. Feed a few more through and the thing seems to jam. Supervisor clears something. At which point we hit the weakness in the user interface: if you are buying lots of the same thing it is hard to tell from the display how many of them you have successfully registered. Well I did my best and after about six supervisor interventions I got to the point where I was invited to pay £18.78p. Not quite right I thought to myself. But near enough the £20 it should of been so perhaps I will not pester the supervisor yet again. March out of store with the 20 bottles. Back home, peruse the bill more carefully and find that I have only paid for 14 of them and that the bill should have been £25 not £20. Maybe the rather hot afternoon yesterday had knocked out the mental arithmetic circuits.
But I now start to feel a bit guilty of shop lifting. On the other hand Tesco would no doubt think I needed medical assistance if I tried to put the matter right with them. So I thought I would put it right by making a donation to charity.
Off to the internet and call up justgiving. Thought to give the money for pigs for Haiti but that one was oversubscribed so I settled for Motor Neurone Disease. And then the fun started. Not for the first time, I had awful trouble working through the donation process, mainly caused, I think, by my getting confused between my justgiving account and my paypal account. I almost gave up but in the end got around the problem by flashing the plastic. Only to discover after the event that instead of making a one off donation (plus Gift Aid) I had set up a monthly donation. Not what I meant to have done at all. But by now I can log into my justgiving account where I find that it is easy enough to turn the thing off. So I have left it in place for the moment.
# posted by Jim @ 3:10 AM 
