All entries for Wednesday 19 August 2015

Selecting Bananas via online shopping, green or yellow?

Writing about web page http://www.tesco.com/groceries/help/default.aspx?name=howToShop&rel=help#Q11

I was in the Coventry Arena Tesco hyperstore early Monday morning to buy bulk bananas for my son’s fruit fly banana bucket traps. As I was picking the ripest and softest bananas the only other people were ‘personal shoppers’, the staff who were filling the special trollies for the online supermarket orders for delivery or to click-and-collect.

Almost all of them came to the banana section as it is the most popular fruit.
I observed a couple of ladies carefully selecting bananas by twos and threes when two older male colleagues discussed their instructions.
“Two yellow bananas and 4 green bananas!” one said, “How am I going to do that? They will get a bunch of 6. The other commented, “Oh those picker notes, I never look at those.”

The business news story that day was again the rise of the discount stores. A market expert said that nobody is loyal to a supermarket these days except maybe to the delivery services. It takes a quite few orders to build up the lists that makes web grocery shopping easy.

The 2 yellow bananas and 4 green bananas order was typical of an elderly person who cannot get to the shops easily and it is a shame that this reasonable request was ignored.

We always use Ocado since we were hit by a delivery with up to 25% substitutions from a Sainsbury’s delivery. Coming from the one huge centre there is rarely any changes with Ocado. They also have been trying to improve the packing where every box is photographed as it leaves the warehouse. However, since the drivers can just grab the bags, and they used to pack the bananas with heavy items, the one thing we never order online is bananas!

Robert McGonigle : 19 Aug 2015 18:53 |  Tags: Online Food Shopping Personal Shopper Picker Notes Supermarket Loyalty |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem