More reasons to shop.

Whoppee! After a couple of months of filling up with petrol at my local Morrisons I have now collected the requisite 5000 points to enable me to claim my £5 shopping voucher. As Morrisons is my nearest garage, and I'm not particularly price sensitive to petrol prices, collecting the points was a simple task.


To collect 5000 points requires quite a few visits. With 15 points for every litre, and the current cost at 94 p a litre, I have had to spend over £300 to get my fiver. So I thought I'd do a bit of top-up shopping yesterday (Sunday) in the local Morrisons.


Now don't get me wrong, Morrisons is really a very impressive operator and has the results to show especially since it has managed to integrate the Safeway stores. But yesterday the staff had a shocker - as Alan Hansen, one of the voices of the company's TV advertising, would say on BBC's Match of the Day about a Premiership defender.


So I took my place in the queue behind two other shoppers. Having unloaded my basket of goods onto the conveyor belt ready for processing I waited my turn. The young male checkout operator was having trouble with his till and called over one supervisor who in turn called over another one. No apologies for the wait and once the three of them had decided to close the till the person in front of me had already taken his two items to another till. The customer at the head of the queue was told to go to another till and the three of them got back to trying to sort the problem.

"What about me?" I queried. "You'll need to go to another till" was the reply. No sorry; no offer of help to transport the twenty items already on the conveyor belt to another till.


"Tell you what I'll just leave it" I said. No hint of any effort to help.


I then went to my local Somerfield, got round in half the time and purchased £35 of goods.


Can any retailer afford to turn away £35 of sales just now, never mind the additional costs of re-shelving product and throwing out items such as the yoghurts, cooked meats and chicken thighs which would have been out of the cold chain for twenty minutes? Staff really need to be empowered to go that extra yard, not even a mile, to put things right for customers.