supermarket woes

The Systems Administrator stopped on the way back from Colchester to buy the ingredients for supper (ingredients, that magic word, now we have a cooker) and admitted on returning home that he could understand my enthusiasm for Waitrose.  I asked whether the SA had noticed Tesco's financial results, reported yesterday.  Turned out they had passed the SA by, but they were dire.  UK like-for-like sales for the three months to May, excluding petrol, fell by 3.7 per cent.  That is an enormous drop, especially at a time when other signs are that economic activity is picking up, and commentators are blaming it on Tesco losing customers to Aldi and Lidl at one end of the market, and Waitrose at the other.

I'm not disputing for a second that there are many people who are finding it very difficult to make ends meet.  The discounters are meeting a real financial need, as well as satisfying the vogue for bargain hunting among the middling sorts who are not trying to feed themselves on five pounds a week.  But there is still money around.  Otherwise we wouldn't have seen childrens' Halloween costumes on sale last October for over twenty quid, and World Cup replica football shirts on sale now at some unearthly price.  People are still buying cappuccinos in Starbucks, and Waitrose are doing very nicely, thank you.  Which suggests that I am not the only former Tesco customer who has reached the point of thinking they really don't care whether they end up paying an extra twenty pence for a pack of butter, they would just like their supermarket shop to feel slightly more like an outing, and less of an ordeal.

Tesco, Mr Philip Clarke, your customer experience is so grotty.  I do not want to navigate my way around aisles that are partially blocked with iron trolleys half full of redundant cardboard boxes that have apparently been abandoned there.  The Systems Administrator's particular bugbear is the congestion caused by the number of Tesco's own staff, picking home delivery orders.  If they are serious about home delivery they should do it out of dark stores, in the SA's view, and not obstruct the progress of customers who have bothered to come shopping in person, and would prefer not to spend all morning over it.

I do not want to spend twenty minutes searching the fruit and vegetable section for garlic, because the place where garlic, fresh ginger and bags of chillis always used to be has mutated into a solid wall of bananas, and the garlic has moved somewhere else, without leaving a forwarding address. It is not 'refreshing the store'.  Refreshing the store would mean starting to sell things that Tesco didn't previously stock, like mutton, or quince paste at any time of the year other than Christmas, or half the middle eastern spices Yotam Ottolenghi specifies in his recipes, or Craster kippers (like you can get in Waitrose).  It does not mean shuffling the existing offering around at intervals so that customers can't find the things they want.  At best, that looks like a ham-fisted attempt to break us out of our routine shopping habits, so that we will buy extra things we didn't mean to, but if I am trying to cook a recipe with garlic, I want garlic.  Suddenly presenting me with bananas doesn't make me want to buy bananas, it just makes me cross.

And I particularly don't want to spend fifteen minutes at the checkout stuck behind a woman doing a hundred pound shop, whose fifty pence off voucher, which is supposed to be valid for two swipes but has failed to register the second time, waits complacently while the till operator calls more and more senior supervisors to try and make the voucher work, before finally getting to somebody senior enough or with sufficient initiative to tell her that she will have to take it up with the customer service desk.  In fact, I am fed up with hanging around while the till operators tear along the little perforations of all the vouchers, even mine, before entering into a dialogue as to why the one for toothpaste has not worked (you had to get the large tube) or explaining that the double points voucher is not valid until next Tuesday.  And I am really tired of almost always getting a voucher saying I could have shopped cheaper elsewhere, when the entrance to the store is plastered with posters trumpeting the everyday low prices, and giving me 54 pence off my next shop, or £1.97.  You mean I have to come back again?  And why is that I only seem to get a slip saying I saved money on my shop about one time in four?

In comparison, Waitrose is so peaceful, an oasis of middle class tranquillity.  No glaring promotional banners, just a nod towards fake bunting.  No random outbreaks of pop music.  No vouchers.  I have no idea whether I could have saved 54 pence off my shop, or £1.97, by going elsewhere, but I don't really mind.  The enhanced customer experience is worth the price of a cappuccino.