Tesco ‘Home Delivery’ – A Disgrace!

Every little doesn’t help! Yesterday evening, my partner Alex and I established that our fridge was empty, our cupboards were bare and we were short on toilet roll. Too much information I hear you say!

Anyway, as it was the evening, rather than get ourselves off the couch after an exhausting day, we decided to order an online shop with tesco.com. It should be noted that we were not on the couch watching TV, like two potatoes, simply a place for us to rest our weary bodies!

We spent the next two hours ordering food and toiletries from Tesco. I looked in the cupboards and fridge/freezer to see what we hadn’t got, whilst Alex put the items in our online shopping basket. I had definitely got the easiest job, as we had nothing in the cupboards or fridge/freezer to count. It has been a busy week including the weekend gone, and naughty as it is, we ate out a little.

That said, it got close to bedtime and we had finally completed our online shop, paid for it and ‘Bob was our Uncle’ as they say, although neither of us have an Uncle Bob. If you haven’t experienced it yourself, ordering a shop online is quite tiring.

After Alex placed the order, being diligent as I am, I said to him, there is ‘no way’ Tesco are going to bring the shopping up the stairs. They just won’t. I remember another store refusing to do this once in Manchester. Alex said ‘don’t be stupid’ it’s home delivery and they’ll have to. He then checked Tesco’s website (to put me at ease, I think) and it confirmed what Alex had said to me, ‘delivered to your door’, ‘every little helps’. Well, it didn’t actually say the last bit. I’m being sarcastic.

I waited in this morning and at 11.00am the buzzer to our flat went. Now we live on the fourth floor of a Georgian terraced building. Ours, being typical of so many grand old buildings in London. I went downstairs and opened the main front door and this is how the conversation with the Tesco delivery driver and I went. Oh yes, I’m ‘playing’ the customer, stupid me, I am the customer.

I must say, I apologise to Tesco for (1) not installing a lift in our building and (2) an escalator. I haven’t had the training in that area, yet!

The Customer: Hi mate.

Tesco Delivery: There are six of these, it’s a big shop.

No s**t Sherlock, he should become a Detective. What he meant was there were six trays of food. We were doing our bit for the environment, asking for the items not to be bagged, Tesco just bring them up in recyclable trays.

The Customer: Ah OK. I’ll help you up.

Tesco Delivery: I’m not carrying them up those stairs.

The Customer: Your website says you do, to the front door.

Tesco Delivery: No, this is your front door.

As in the ‘main communal door’, four floors below our ‘flat door’. I can’t recall sleeping in this area, but hey, maybe I have on a drunken night out!

The Customer: You can’t expect me to carry individual items up the stairs (as in ‘out’ of the trays).

Tesco Delivery: Well, I’m not. I’ve got bad legs.

The Customer: Tesco shouldn’t have sent a driver with bad legs, when we indicated we ‘live’ on the ‘fourth floor’.

Tesco Delivery: Well, I’m not taking them up. You can leave it if you want (as in our shopping).

I beg your pardon. I didn’t actually say this bit, but you get the gist.

The Customer: Your website states you bring them to your door (I was boring myself now).

Tesco Driver: Well, we don’t.

The Tesco driver then gets on his mobile to his depot manager. I quickly ran upstairs to find my mobile to give Alex a call, to check if Jeremy Beadle was still alive and playing with me! I came back down the stairs and the conversation continued as follows…

Tesco Delivery: Here he is.

He was on the phone to his depot manager, who wouldn’t speak with me.

Tesco Delivery: Listen, I’ll take them to the first floor with you and that’s it.

Hello, we live on the ‘fourth floor’. Was he seriously going to ‘just dump’ our fruit & veg, meat and wet wipes outside Mr. and Mrs. Smith’s flat door on the first floor?

The Customer: That’s ridiculous.

Tesco Delivery: Well that’s it.

The Customer: Forget it then.

Tesco Delivery: OK.

The driver then walked off into the sunset away from the ‘main’ communal door in tow with the food Alex and I thought we were having for dinner this evening. Typical.

Seriously, I thought it was a joke. Tesco is a disgrace and should be ashamed. We spent unnecessary hours ordering our weekly shop online yesterday evening, paid over £100 for it, stayed in this morning and now have nothing to show for it, apart from me having a hungry tummy and a headache.

As I write this post, I don’t even know were our shopping is. I wonder whether it’s in the back of the delivery van still, the driver dumps it and we still get charged for it or he takes it back and says we weren’t in! My mind boggles.

Now, if you let people treat you like a dog, then soon you’ll start to bark. I wasn’t some ‘it’ he had just trod on in the street. I was a customer, who paid for a service including delivery and got neither. No service, no delivery. It’s no wonder many aspects of our Country are going down the pan. There is no pride anymore.

Although I find it a bit cheesy, I’d rather an American customer service experience any day were they say ‘have a nice day’ more times than you can remember. Why can’t Britain be more like that? We shouldn’t accept bad service, because if we do, that’s the only kind of service we’ll be guaranteed in the future. I have some pride. I would rather go without, than have a bad taste in my mouth after a bad tesco.com delivery. Alex and I even talked about which online supermarket to use, I knew we should have gone with Sainsbury’s, but hey.

No one including Tesco is beyond reproach. Just because you are the big guy and number one in the supermarket league table, the small guy does and will always matter. You are the number one supermarket, because customers like me have put you there, visit your stores and use, sorry try to use your online services. What were you doing sending a delivery driver who couldn’t deliver, because he couldn’t walk properly?

Never again. I will enjoy putting a light to our Tesco Club Cards and at every opportunity will avoid stepping into one of your supermarkets including Tesco Extra, Tesco Metro, Tesco Express and anything else which bears your name. I very much believe in Karma and sometimes those who are arrogant or complacent fall as quickly as they rise. Alex and I should have been ‘good to ourselves’ and visited Sainsbury’s after all.

This has been another ‘View from the Bottom’, well the fourth floor really and still with no shopping!

‘Every little helps’ – as Nan from the BBC’ The Catherine Tate Show says “what a f**king liberty”.

Max.

As always, I have sent a copy of my post to Tesco ‘Customer Services’. Well, that’s what ‘they’ call this department.

www.blog.kevinmaxwell.co.uk

Published by My Mum. Copyright © Kevin Maxwell Film, Media & Performance 2010.