Monday 15 December 2008

TESCO: A Tale of Two Porkys

As customers of Tesco’s Online Grocery service the Neill family value being spared the weekly slalom through the supermarket aisles. Normally the service works flawlessly but recently the wheels have come off the trolleys! Last week, a full 24 hours after the pork ban, Tesco in Nenagh delivered our order with no less than 5 pork products including sausages and ham! The driver was completely oblivious to the ban which was a little bizarre. I decided to phone the store and asked to speak to a manager only to be told by him that the ‘picker’ probably hadn’t heard about the ban! I pointed out that this was surely the responsibility of the management and he said that they had been under pressure lifting the stock off the shelves all night! Bearing in mind that the Pork products are largely confined to two aisles one wonders how on earth they managed to spend all night removing pork products and missed the sausages, the ham, the rashers, the hawian pizzas and the pork chops!

Forgiving folk that we are we persevered, putting last weeks faux pas down to an aberration and patiently waited for yesterday’s delivery….and waited….and waited…and gave up waiting and rang the customer service line. They were hugely apologetic and promised to sort it out. I pointed out that our account status was showing ‘delivered’ when I accessed our online account! Apparently as soon as the van is loaded it is shown as delivered on the system! Anyway a few minutes later a phone call came from Tesco in Navan! Yes Navan! They were wondering why we were expecting them to deliver! Having clarified that we were waiting on Nenagh not Navan we got another call, this time from the driver in Nenagh who was just leaving and would be with us in 20 minutes and laboured over the fact that it was his day off! Not our problem but anyway we waited and waited and waited and almost an hour later the driver arrived with the correct order – Thank God for small mercies! On his day off he had been in the shop as a customer and was asked to do a favour by the manager and do the delivery! The explanation - Wait for it……The rostered driver had gone home to Poland on holidays and hadn’t returned! Far from being on the truck when I rang customer service, the shopping wasn’t even picked!

These two experiences have one thing in common: In the first we were being sold porkys and in the second we were being told porkys!

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

That is why I like to pick my own porkys!

Anonymous said...

A lot to be said for it - You get a lot of short dated stuff when you shop online! Its grand for non perishables but a bit hit and miss with the fresh produce.

Póló said...

Try this for a pre-porky:

Helen Duignan said...

There you go - shopping in Tesco again - putting honest hard working Tipperary folk out of business..