Peter Viney's Blog

We’re ecumenical. We shop most in Waitrose, Marks & Spencer (M&S) and Tesco, but can also be found in Sainsburys, ASDA and Co-op. We avoid LIDL and ALDI. People often praise them to the skies, but to us they’re full of knock-offs of name brands and dull generic fruit and vegetables.

So …

Loyalty cards

I carry two useful ones, Tesco and Sainsbury’s Nectar. You get money back on both, and anyway we buy petrol at one or the other. When our credit card was cloned at a petrol station, MasterCard security told me, ‘We’re not laying blame … BUT we never get cards cloned at Tesco or Sainsbury petrol stations. If you work in credit card security, you never buy petrol elsewhere.’

 I carry two useless ones, M&S Sparks card and Waitrose. I can’t see I have ever gained anything from an M&S card except to give them information about me. A total waste of wallet space. I shall cut it up.

Waitrose used to be good, as the card gave you a free daily newspaper. On Saturday and Sunday that was worth up to £3.50.  No longer.  They had a few years in which to destroy the livelihood of all the nearby newsagents, and they did it, but now they’ve stopped. Now, just once a month, you get a free FOOD magazine. This is full of recipes with ingredients which they don’t have in stock. Their offers are online and you’re supposed to take them in on your phone with QR codes. Not me. Not anyone of my generation. I really can’t be bothered. I also get irritated watching someone fumbling through several phone screens to reduce the price of the apples from £1.30 to £1.20.

 We’ve also gone from 80% Waitrose to about 50% Waitrose or less as a result. Tesco’s offers are there in store, marked in bright yellow, for loyalty card holders. The Tesco system is simple and works. No one else’s competes. And hey, Tesco’s cheaper! Though after today’s Tesco self check-out experience, I’m crossing them off my list. Waitrose do still have humans on the tills.

Loyalty cards and car park refunds

This has only happened at Sainsbury and M&S, not often, but enough. It’s bizarre. This was Saturday at M&S.

The woman in front of me was next. The check-out woman had not started putting her purchases through.

(For American readers, a purse is a ‘change purse’ inside a ‘handbag’ – which you would call a purse).

Check-out: Have you got a Sparks card?
Woman: Yes, hold on …

The woman unzips her handbag.
She takes out her purse.
She extracts the ‘Sparks’ loyalty card.
She closes her purse, and puts it back in her handbag.
She hands over the card
The check-out woman scans it and hands it back.
The woman opens her handbag.
She takes out her purse.
She puts the card in.
She replaces the purse in her handbag.
She zips up her handbag.

Check-out: And have you got a car park ticket?
Woman: Yes, hold on …

The woman unzips her handbag.
She takes out her purse.
She extracts the car park ticket.
She closes her purse, and puts it back in her handbag.
She hands over the car park ticket
The check-out woman scans it and hands it back.
The woman opens her handbag.
She takes out her purse.
She puts the car park ticket in.
She replaces the purse in her handbag.
She zips up her handbag.

The check-out puts her groceries through.

Check-out: That’s £43.67
Woman: Hold on …

The woman unzips her handbag.
She takes out her purse.
She extracts the credit card.
She closes her purse, and puts it back in her handbag.
She puts the credit card in the machine.
She takes it out.
A receipt comes out,
The woman opens her handbag.
She takes out her purse.
She puts the credit card and receipt in.
She replaces the purse in her handbag.
She zips up her handbag.

Fortunately, I’d bought a newspaper. I’d read all the football results by then. I wondered whether to discard the newspaper as I’d read what I’d wanted.

Check-out: Have you got a Sparks card?
Me: Yes, I’ll give it to you at the end.
Check-out: I’d rather put it in first …
Me: No, I’ll give it to you at the end.
Check-out: Oh. Have you got a car park ticket?
Me: Yes, and I’ll give it to you at the end.
Check-out: I can put them both in now.
Me: No, thanks. I’ll only need to take out my wallet once if we do it at the end.
Check-out: Oh!

I look at the next check-out. That check-out person has handled four customers with similar quantities of purchases while she’s done one. That check-out person didn’t ask for loyalty card or car park ticket until the purchases had all gone through. I ponder. Is it deliberate laziness? Very few check-out people ask for the card and car park ticket (they refund the £1 parking) first, but a few do. It’s an incredible waste of time.

I also wonder in supermarkets if people get bonuses for speed. Some check-out operators work at more than double the pace of others. Is that recorded for a bonus? It should be.

On which, the car park ticket at our local M&S is particularly annoying. You need a pound coin for parking (it doesn’t do swipe and pay nor phone prking), plus a pound coin to release the trolley. You get the latter back when you replace the trolley. However, you don’t get the parking coin back, they take it off your bill. Pre-covid, I always had pound coins. Since Lockdown, people pay by card even for 50p. Some shops still decline cash at all. I’m usually short of pound coins, except the one I keep in the car for the trolley. I want my pound coin back, not have it knocked off the bill.

I hate self check-outs

Go back to when I first started driving. All petrol pumps had attendants. Yes, they might wipe the windows for you too, though the American ‘wipe the windows, check the oil and tyres’ was unlikely in Britain. We never thought back then that the public would accept filling cars yourself, getting your hands smelly with petrol. At least, if hydrogen cars eventually arrive, it seems the attendant will be back.

Supermarkets are well on the way …

I hated the concept. UK supermarkets operate on way bigger margins than US supermarkets, probably because the concept of having someone pack for you in addition to someone to check you through is unknown in the UK, except for a couple of days before Christmas when queues are very long.

Staff are employed to push you towards self check-out, thus destroying their own future jobs. They’re increasing self check-outs, having just one or two human check-outs in a large store, and they choose the slowest check-out workers for those too.

When they first started, I always said, ‘What’s my discount for using a self check-out?’

That perplexed them, ‘There is no discount.’

‘Then why should I do the work for the supermarket for nothing?’

If they’d given 10%, or even 5%, I could have accepted them.

There is a loathsome aspect to self check-outs. Have you stood behind an elderly person who chats to the checkout operator in a normal check-out? You glance down at the meal-for-one packet, the half-bottle of sherry, one banana, the treat of a bar of chocolate. You know this old person lives alone, and that this might be their only interaction with a live person all day. That’s why they buy food a day at a time. I am never impatient as they exchange pleasantries. The check-out staff at our local Tesco and Waitrose are always lovely to them too. That’s gone with self check-outs.

It’s not only the interaction. The whole self check-out business confuses.

These systems are very precious about what’s in or not in the bagging area. Then they freeze if the item requires you to be over-18 until the harassed supervisor comes in, inserts their card, and allows you to buy whatever it is. Then there’s the creased pack with bar code that won’t scan. Then there’s the loose fruit and vegetables, or bakery items. If you know you’re going to use the self check-out you avoid them. Six screens of bakery items, only to find that pain au chocolat are on a totally different section.

I walked out of Sainsburys leaving all the items after I’d had to call the supervisor three times for different items, then when I put my card in, it said ‘Error.’ She came over and said,  ‘You’ll have to start again.’

Having written this paragraph, I went to my local medium sized Tesco. There were major changes. The self-check area had doubled in size, divided into BASKET and TROLLEY. The trolley check-out had space for three bags rather than one.

There were four conventional check outs left out of maybe sixteen originally. Three were closed. I had a trolley. The line for the single conventional check out was EIGHT people long, all with full trolleys. A further checkout was closed, but a woman was sitting there doing paperwork. So I went and asked:

‘There are eight full trolleys at the only checkout. Why don’t you open another one?’
‘We want you to use the new trolley check outs,’ was the answer.

There is another social consequence. Jobs are going, as they did with petrol stations. Supermarket check-outs were a good job for those forced to retire early. A lot of operators don’t look particularly fit (OK, some are very overweight) but it’s a reasonable sitting down job, and many have good empathetic skills with people.

90% of these jobs are going to go. What will they be replaced with?

This is the one I still haven’t tried. The Quick Check. The very trusting ‘Scan it yourself’ where you walk around with a scanner and place your groceries directly in a bag. I will have to submit to it- at least it ends queuing and issues in the self-check bagging areas.

ADDITION:
On my Facebook page, posters pointed out how embarrassing and time-consuming (making a mockery of “Quick Check”) it is when you use self-scan then get stopped for a random check. Marion added this comment on Tesco Self-scan.:

In Sainsburys they’ve gone further- you do it with your own phone:

This branch has separate SELF CHECK and SMART SHOP areas:

Bags

After a laudable campaign by the Daily Mail free plastic bags have stopped. First it was that you paid 5p for 10p for a throwaway bag. Then it was a Bag For Life for 10p (they replace it free when it falls apart) or it’s carry a selection of tote bags with you, which we do. Tesco sold sturdy ones for 50p.

Supermarkets used to declare that bag revenue went to ecological projects. They stopped saying it. I expect they stopped doing it. A minor downside is that charity shops used to have piles of donated supermarket free bags that they could use. No more.

For a while Tesco gave free bio-degradable bags, but they were wont to bio-degrade on the way home. We put some in a cupboard, opened the cupboard and thought we had mice. No, the bags had bio-degraded into an unpleasant and probably unhealthy powdery mess..

Yet they have never tried the brown paper sacks found in US supermarkets. This applies even more in the clothes section at Marks & Spencer where they charge for a plastic bag, yet other clothes retailers simply give a free paper one. I asked  a Marks & Spencer management team who were doing their normal important managers meeting team on the floor ignoring long queues at the only two open check outs out of ten. They said they couldn’t use paper because it can’t be recycled because the ink for printing their logo is not recyclable. Really? Utter bollocks.  So why are newspapers and magazines recyclable? Then I said, ‘So why not use plain bags with no logo?’ There was no answer to that.

They’ve now got into having re-usable mesh ‘fresh produce’ bags for fruit and vegetables that you have to buy at between 20p and 50p. Tesco is 30p. I haven’t gone there, though they are now switching to paper in some supermarkets. I think they should offer a choice of reusable or paper. Will we get used to it? We got used to having non-disposable bags.

However, Waitrose has gone for compostable fresh produce bags:

There is the unmentioned question of hygiene from re-using sturdy bags for years. At the start of Covid, some American supermarkets banned re-usable bags.

A study from the International Association for Food protection showed that over 50 per cent of reusable bags contain large quantities of bacteria – and may even contain E. Coli and faecal matter.

It used to be that if you bought wrapped and sealed chicken, you could place it another plastic bag. A survey found there were traces of chicken, meaning a risk of salmonella, on the exterior of 70% of supermarket pre-packaged chicken packs. In catering, you are not supposed to store food that has to be cooked next to food that doesn’t. So you can’t put raw lamb in the same section as cooked ham or smoked salmon. When they do have packers in the few days before Christmas, I prefer to pack myself. I do not put packs of raw meat or fish in the same bag as dairy products for example. You should clean the interior of re-usable bags. No one does.

Tesco carries a warning in small print on the base of the bag. Most don’t:

These tote bags are elaborately printed. So why don’t they print bags with RAW and COOKED and DAIRY on them? You could have meat and fish on the raw etc.

The bag apologist

Women are better at reusable bags than men. They have handbags to put them in, men don’t. I try to keep bags in the car, so that if I forget to take them in, I can just take the trolley to the car and load the bags there.

There’s a definite gender difference here. I see women apologising frequently and guiltily if they don’t have a reusable bag.

I’m terribly sorry. I haven’t got my bags with me. You see, I only came in to buy a bottle of water, then I saw the biscuits, then I got the rest. I never usually forget. I try to always keep one in my handbag but after I used it last time, I left it in the car. It’s so silly of me. I hope you don’t mind. So I’m afraid I’ll need a bag for life. Sorry.

I don’t see many men that concerned about plastic and the environment.

Bag, please. Grunt.

They think it’s a grocery store in the 1950s

When I was a child, we walked up the road to Robsons, the grocers, at the end. My mum stood patiently in a queue, chatting with friends, for perhaps 20 to 30 minutes. Me and my friend Micky plotted how we could quietly break a few biscuits in the large open containers and ask our mums to buy us some broken biscuits (much cheaper). The three or four grocers took one customer at a time and found the things they wanted. They cut cheese. They weighed sliced meat and put it in bags. They took tins of Spam and corned beef and custard powder and packets of Omo washing powder from shelves.  No self-service. Then they put it all in a cardboard box, called for the delivery boy, clipped him round the ear for tardiness, and sent him to wobble on a heavy black bicycle the four hundred yards to your house with the box in a large front pannier. See the TV sitcom Open All Hours. The queue would be repeated at the greengrocer’s, the butcher’s, then at the baker’s. The fishmonger’s van came along the street on Fridays, and people went out and queued for fish.

Then the first supermarkets opened with self-service. We lived close to a Co-op, and my mum would only drink Co-op 99 Tea for the rest of her life. Then you chose your own stuff and got divi stamps … green stamps.

Some people have failed to note the switch from the individual attention of an obsequious grocer wearing a brown dust coat or apron. As I’ve stereotyped men earlier, I’ll add that this is virtually always women. They’ll stand and ask the check-out person to pack their bags for them. This is a service readily available for the disabled or very elderly, but I don’t mean them.  

A variation is the distrustful customer. This one has their eyes glued to the cash register read-out for every item. Therefore they make no effort to pack their bags until every item has gone through. Then they’ll do it slowly and carefully. Some will then stand and examine the receipt.*

(* I strongly advise checking the receipt in M&S. You will see a large display of (say) starters / tapas with a sign ‘4 for the price of 3′ or ‘30% off if you buy five’ (in tiny, tiny print: stickered items only) Let’s say they have twelve different packs. Ten packs will have a red sticker in the corner. Two won’t. You will choose an unstickered one. When you get to the check out, the discount won’t work for any of them. I am convinced that this is deliberate M&S policy. BUT if you do check the receipt, do it after you’ve paid and cleared the area, and take the issie to Customer service, not the check-out assistant.)

One lady wanted to argue the toss over 5p in Tesco and managed to get the check-out supervisor then the store manager involved while we put our goods back in our trolleys and moved to another check out. No one had the sense to say, ‘Let’s go and discuss this at the customer service desk.’

Never been in a supermarket before

Twenty or thirty years ago it was quite common to see lone males left sitting in cars in the car park waiting and reading the paper. Let’s be horribly classist, but it was usually The Sun or The Daily Mirror. It’s much rarer now. Couples shop together.

You still get examples of people, nearly always men, who are unused to supermarkets. It was only about a dozen years ago that my pension adviser told me in some excitement that he’d just been into ASDA, and it was totally brilliant, they did their own pizzas that you could take home and cook! Yes, just like going to a pizzeria! There was a huge array of things on sale. He’d never known that there were so many types of vinegar and oil. I said they’d been doing that for thirty odd years and asked when he’d last been in a supermarket. ‘Um, it would have been some years back,’ he admitted, ‘But I’m going to buy shares in ASDA!’

You see them waiting  motionless and vacant right at the back of the conveyor belt behind the person actually doing the shopping. It will be seen on holiday weekends, and with the newly retired. They have no idea of the check-out etiquette. They have no idea that you put a divider down so that the next customer can start moving stuff from the trolley to the belt. They have no idea that you shuffle forward to give them space to do this. It’s not confined entirely to the retired male, but they’re the usual suspects.  

The phone call

This happens in the post office too. The loud mobile phone call ignoring the check-out assistant who then packs their bags for them. It’s bad enough receiving them, worse when the person initiates the call. The conversation is always inane and ends:

Love you … Love you too … Love you more.

Then the assistant points out the card machine, or says ‘That’ll be £56.76, please.’

The snappy reply is, ‘I’m on the phone!’

The invisible customers

We’ve mostly all done it. Perhaps getting something for an elderly or sick relative or neighbour, so you put a divider and make it two transactions so you can pack separately and give them the receipt.

Some people just do it for their own arcane accounting purposes. My maximum ‘invisible customer’ count so far is four transactions / one shopper. You may have seen five.