SILLY SAINSBURYS STRIKES AGAIN !

Silly Sainsburys Strikes Again !

December 8th 2009

It’s that supermarket again ! You know, the really, really silly one – Sainsburys.

Last Saturday December 6th at about four p.m. I went to buy just a handful of things at Sainsburys. Just imagine my astonishment at finding a huge queue of cars slowly edging forward to get into the car park.

Christmas shoppers must have gone berserk, I thought. It was the first Saturday of December and perhaps they were all desperate to get rid of all their money while they still had any; before the banks orchestrated another financial crisis and all the cash finally ran out just before Christmas, or the banks held onto everyone else’s cash for good because they just felt entitled to it as a Christmas bonus for themselves anyway.

When I eventually got into the car park it was even worse – completely jammed with cars with lights on and engines running honking at each other with frustration in the drizzle as they desperately tried to get out of the hellish place with their shopping.

But none of them were going anywhere, and that was what was blocking any cars from coming in and parking so as they could do their pre-Christmas shopping. It was chaos.

None of the long queue of cars waiting to go at the exit was moving, so I thought I would go and have a look to see what was stopping them leaving the car park.

Two shiny new barriers blocking the exit to the Sainsburys car had just been installed and two queues of completely stationary cars waited motionless with engines grumbling in front of them.

A rotund Indian looking gentleman holding an umbrella delicately in one hand was engaged in lengthy and earnest conversation with the driver at the head of one of the two queues of traffic waiting to escape.

“Do you have a card ?” I heard him say to the driver of the car.

”What bloody card ? Can’t you see the entry barriers are permanently up and no-one is being asked to press the entry button to get a swipe card to get into the car park,” said the irate driver.

The Indian looking gentleman slowly and painfully passed a few words of explanation to the driver before bending down awkwardly and fumbling around underneath the barrier control to press the release button to lift it and let the driver go. It took ages of fumbling to achieve this. It looked like a real bit of complicated skill was exerted to perform this simple button pressing function.

Then, the Indian looking gentleman slowly turned his bulk around and straightened up with some considerable effort to walk leisurely across the three yards to the other barrier to have the same conversation with the driver at the head of that queue before deigning to release him from the parking hell that Sainsburys car park had now become.

I watched this oaf ponderously ambling from one barrier to another and was completely astonished at this sight. What on earth possessed the man to make such an art form out of being as slow as possible to lift the barriers for each individual car. As cars were still entering the car park much faster than they were allowed to leave there were clearly going to be a lot of very angry people stuck in Sainsbury’s car park for the rest of the afternoon instead of being able to continue with their Christmas shopping. They were going to be hopping mad in fact.

So I approached this Indian looking gentleman to politely enquire why he didn’t just lift both the barriers and leave them up so the traffic could leave unhindered by his solicitousness.

Imagine my astonishment when he hurled a torrent of abuse at me, shouting “ Why, you stupid bloody man can’t you let me do my job, I’m not talking to you. You ‘re stopping these drivers from leaving are you ?” And further inarticulate insults wheezed at me in a thick Hindi accent.

As I thought this was quite ridiculous, I thought I would speak to the duty store manager lurking at the Customer Services desk as I went in. He identified himself as ‘Steve’ and pointed to his badge which also said ‘Steve’ with no surname.

So, Sainsburys obviously make their staff deliberately anonymous and unidentifiable then. I wonder why ?

Anyway, this ‘Steve’ commenced by telling me the car park was nothing to do with Sainsburys as they pay sub-contractor Euro Car Parks to manage the Sainsburys car park. He added there was only one car park attendant on duty at the moment which is why only one barrier at a time could be opened.

When I asked ‘Steve’ why, as it was Sainsburys’ own car park, they couldn’t just leave both barriers permanently up so both queues of cars could just go and stop blocking the entire car park of several hundred cars, Steve said, No he couldn’t do that because Sainsburys needed to retrieve all the swipe cards from shoppers who did actually have them to operate the new barriers.

Well then, said I, seeing as how he was the duty manager at Sainsburys, couldn’t he put one of his many staff at one of the barriers to help the Indian looking gentleman let the second irate queue of trapped stationary cars out at the same time as the first queue, ‘Steve said, “it’s more than my job’s worth”.

“Why’s that”, I said. “

Well”, ‘Steve’ told me, “It’s insurance isn’t it. I can’t just just put one of my staff out there. It’s a health and safety issue.They wouldn’t be insured to operate the barriers to let people out of the car park, would they ? ”

“It’s more than my job’s worth. I haven’t any authority to do that. What would happen if one of my staff was killed letting cars out of the car park. Where would that leave Sainsburys ?”, he said.

“What”, I said incredulously. “ All they have to do is press a button to lift the barrier for each car. It isn’t what you would call a dangerous job, is it ? I mean it is a bit difficult getting yourself killed just pressing a button, isn’t it ?”

“Well I can’t just ignore health and safety rules‘, Steve repeated. “It’s more than my job’s worth. I mean if someone got killed or injured out there or something Sainsburys could be lumbered with a huge insurance claim and I would get fired.”

So, dear reader, although I only had to spend a few minutes buying about ten items from Sainsburys, I was trapped in that bloody car park for three hours before the queues of cars ceased snaking all around the car park preventing people from even leaving their parking spaces, as they were doomed to just sit in their cars gnashing their teeth while their precious Saturday afternoon of Christmas shopping ebbed slowly away from them.

I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

SAINSBURYS BULLYING THEIR CUSTOMERS – YET AGAIN !

This is a letter I sent to Sainsburys and I thought I would share it with you readers as it is typical of how shoppers are treated with rudeness as well as aggressive violence by totally ignorant retail staff all over the country. People who live in other countries are aghast with astonishment at the appalling way retail staff behave in the United Kingdom – and rightly so. It is a national disgrace.

We are not simply a nation of shopkeepers and shoppers. We are a nation of thoroughly abused shoppers and arrogant, abusive shopkeepers !

February 11th 2010

to: customerservice@sainsburys.co.uk

Subject: RE: SAINSBURY’S HORSHAM

Dear Sir/Madam,

On 7th January 2010 at 16.30 pm I bought a small number of items at the Sainsburys store in Horsham, Sussex. Because there were only three items I reluctantly used the automated checkout. I was reluctant because I detest them. What followed confirmed why I am right to detest them.

Firstly I was really annoyed when the silly machine accused me of shoplifting simply because my reflex action on putting three small items in the plastic bag was to pick it up and put the bag on the floor, something you always do if not using a trolley at a manned checkout.

Then, my real complaint is that when I put my £10 note into the machine to pay for the £2.59 bill, the coin change of £2.41 rattled out in front of me leaving me at a loss as to know where the remaining £5 was. I was standing (as you do) right in front of the ‘controls’ area slightly to the left of the weighing machine where you naturally move to to deal with putting your money into the machine.

There is absolutely no clue available that any change due the customer in bank notes is going to appear somewhere completely different, way over to the customer’s right just underneath the weighing machine, where the customer can’t see a thing anyway.

From the position the customer is going to be standing in it is impossible to see the notice just above the cash note dispenser, or to actually have any idea there is a dispenser there. Natural common sense and normal intuition would never lead a customer to think the change in paper notes would appear obscurely somewhere completely different from the ‘paying control’ area he is standing in front of where he puts the money and in takes coin change out.

It demonstrates very bad design, which is the usual problem of any form of electronics. Programmers and designers seem to be pathologically ignorant and/or stupid.

As a result of being pressurised by the queue behind me being clearly impatient for me to finish and go, and me having no idea where my five pound notes worth of change was, I asked the Sainsburys employee at the machine in front of me, opposite the machine I was using, if he would be kind enough to tell me where the change was.

This employee, whose name tag had ‘Mo’ on it, behaved appallingly. First of all he just started shouting very loudly and incoherently at me and I found it extremely difficult to understand him because he was both shouting and slurring his words together because he was too lazy to speak English properly (which he later proved to be able to ), as it was clearly not his first language.

He did not come around to where I was standing to show me where this money was, and I simply couldn’t understand his garbled shouting. It seemed he was treating me as a senile idiot or something for failing to be able to operate an electronic checkout and thought The louder he shouted the more likely it was I would understand his incoherent instructions.

After several attempts this ‘Mo’ made at shouting instructions at me that I simply couldn’t understand because they were being shouted and they were quite incoherent, I explained to him I could not understand him and I asked him to stop shouting at me and could he please just come around to my side of the machine and show me what he was talking about.

With a great display of impatient irritation Mo did eventually come around to my side of the machine but was still angrily shouting at me and even thrust his face unpleasantly right into mine as though I really was a deaf, senile old dodderer – which I am most certainly not.

At this point I lost my patience a bit because this person was clearly very rude and ignorant and I told him to stop shouting at me at the top of his voice. This only made him shout even louder and it obliged me to raise my voice to repeat my quite polite request to him to stop shouting at me (and displaying very aggressive body language, as he had been from the very beginning).

At this point ‘Mo’ bizarrely shouted at me even louder telling me to stop shouting at him. As every action from this man over a considerable number of minutes had been violently unpleasant, aggressive and quite clearly indicated his determination to ‘pick a fight’ by virtue of his entire demeanour and body language, I was obliged to speak loudly as I repeated my request to him to stop shouting at me.

By now loads of adjacent shoppers were tuned into this man shouting at the top of his voice and they were finding it quite entertaining wondering what might happen next. Would this violent little man resort to hitting me as he was exhausting his efforts to intimidate me by just shouting at me non-stop ?

Indeed, Mo now lowered his voice to a menacing growl telling me to ‘shut up’. At which point I told him that I had only been obliged to raise my voice to say anything at all because he had been angrily shouting non-stop at me at the top of his voice right from the start.

This seemed to completely incense ‘Mo’ as he quivered with uncontrollable rage at my efforts to not be intimidated by him, which was obviously his intention from the word go.

As ‘Mo’ desperately controlled his obvious unhinged desire to thump me, he grabbed my arm and thrust me in the direction of the supermarket exit and told me to ‘get out’ and ‘leave the supermarket’.

This was quite obviously a deliberate and entirely unnecessary action on his part as I was leaving anyway, by now having retrieved the remainder of my change.

This ‘Mo’ person was still shrieking at me as he tried to show me his superiority and dominance by virtue of him being able to throw a customer out of the supermarket because he was an employee with that ability which he chose to willfully misuse as his trump card in trying to humiliate me.

While at first I was minded to simply depart as I had completed my shopping, I changed my mind and went to the customer service desk and asked to speak to the manager, one Mr Christopher LaForte.

Mr LaForte listened to my complaint about being unnecessarily shouted at by ‘Mo’ and as ‘Mo’ had by now mysteriously appeared in the vicinity and was contriving to edge close enough to hear my conversation with Mr LaForte, I beckoned to ‘Mo’ to come closer and participate in discussing the matter. I made it quite plain by smiling in a friendly manner and presenting a conciliatory demeanour towards ‘Mo’ that I intended no malice or ill will.

But ‘Mo’ suddenly started shouting at me yet again while I was speaking to Mr Laforte, having originally responded to my beckoning him over. The thrust of this shouting was now that I shouldn’t have beckoned him over, despite the fact that I displayed obvious conciliatory signs towards him.

When Mr LaForte asked Mo to be quiet he simply ignored Mr LaForte and carried on shouting. By now a posse of security guards had arrived and were perplexed at what to do as they could see it was a Sainsburys employee who was out of control and shouting and generally displaying tendencies towards violence of one sort or another.

So the security guards were hopping from one foot to another; and I have no doubt that if it was me being loud they would have frog-marched me straight out of the building as they clearly looked as though they had expected to do.

However, I was simply standing in front of Mr Laforte in a state of complete and silent dumbfoundedness at the extra-ordinary behaviour of this highly aggressive Sainsburys employee.

Eventually ‘Mo’ departed. Mr LaForte told me he would speak to ‘Mo’ the next day as ‘Mo’ had finished his shift for the day, and hadn’t actually been on duty when I originally spoke to him, but had been making his own purchases before going home.

There is obviously something fundamentally wrong with the attitude of Sainsburys employees towards customers as I have experienced other instances of unpleasant employees at your supermarket in Horsham.

Curiously, I have never had this problem at any other supermarket, not even the Sainsburys one I used near my house London.

I have also noticed how the staff at Waitrose supermarket in Horsham, where I now do the bulk of my shopping, having become sick and tired of this sort of nastiness at Sainsburys, are quite noticeably politer and more helpful and friendly than Sainsburys and any run of the mill other supermarket.

When I mentioned to one of the Waitrose staff the fact that Waitrose staff appeared to be quite markedly more friendly and pleasant than staff in other supermarkets, I was told that they made a point of being friendly and helpful. They also told me unequivocably they had also noticed how other non-Waitrose supermarkets were noticeably unfriendly, offhand and rude.

So, this speaks volumes about how the management of Sainsburys obviously hold their customers in contempt as they fail to train staff to behave as any retail staff should behave if they don’t want to lose their customers.

Perhaps this contemptuous arrogance of Sainsburys’ management is a product of a near monopoly of the market which leaves Sainsburys not caring less about their customers.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Yours Sincerely,

Boz

APPALLING STATE OF SECONDARY SCHOOL EDUCATION IN UK

Below is an exchange of emails between me and my eleven year old son’s history teacher which have suddenly made me realise how truly ghastly State education is in secondary schools, and how I must do something to get my son away from this appalling and useless State education system which is obviously already wrecking my son’s real keenness to learn.

He is an obviously bright person who could do well with decent teaching, but equally obviously, it looks as though he will be badly let down by useless teachers in a useless educational system orchestrated by a dangerously useless doctrinaire Labour Government engaged in fourteen years of social engineering and manipulation to impoverise the entire population intellectually as well as financially.

SAINSBURYS SUPERMARKET BUSY ANNOYING EVEN MORE PEOPLE WITH THEIR ARROGANT STUPIDITY !

This is a comment describing someone else’s ghastly experience of Sainsburys

“I was doing my weekly shop in Sainsburys (basically food items totalling to £40, I only wanted to buy 2 bottles of erdinger beer), now I’m 20 years old almost 21, never had a problem but the cashier asked me for ID, which I did provide, then the cashier was like ‘I don’t think we accept this, it’s only full driving license or passport’ now.

” I am still angry about this and its completely ruined my evening, I think being asked to leave the shop (for apparently creating a public nuisance) considering I was not being aggressive nor abusive has made me extremely annoyed and I was close to tears when leaving the shop feeling like I had been victimised and it felt like other customers were leering at me

SAINSBURY’S BEHAVE APPALLINGLY – AGAIN !

– TRY SOMETHING NEW TODAY, PERSECUTE A CUSTOMER!

aaaaaargh !

Big supermarkets like Sainsbury’s are no longer satisfied with selling shoddy products at inflated prices and using strong arm tactics to drive every other small local independent food shop out of business so the they can control the entire domestic grocery shopping market.

They are now becoming obsessed with a delusion that they have a right to control and abuse their customers at will – as well as extort ‘fines’ from them for using Sainsbury’s car parks or failing to abide by the precise ‘rules’ about car parks which Sainsbury’s dream up.

Below is a letter I sent to Sainsbury’s today describing a ridiculously abusive item of their behaviour experienced recently.

To: Jerome.Kenyon@sainsburys.co.uk

Dear Mr Jerome Kenyon,

On the fourth of April 2009, at about 21.30 I made some purchases at the Horsham branch of Sainsbury’s.

I tendered my car parking card, as usual for, swiping. I have a distinct and unequivocal memory of doing so, because I remember the till operator handed it back to me together with the till receipt and change, and my hands were vaguely full of dealing with packing shopping at the the same time. So, being unable to handle all these items at the same time, I distinctly remember the till operator dropping the parking card accidentally, and then only handing me the change and receipt which I bundled into my wallet together as I always do.

Because of the kerfuffle I have described ( which always tends to take place as till operators usually ignore the fact you are packing shopping away and just thrust the receipt and change at you without the normal politeness of waiting, expecting you to deal with that at the same time – a usual feature of every supermarket !) I was so involved in getting my shopping out of the way for the next customer and putting my wallet away, that I failed to notice at the time that I had not now been given the parking card which had been swiped, and the till operator had forgotten to give it to me as she had put it to one side in order to wait for my hands to complete the other tasks so that I could then take the parking card.

When I then went to my car and discovered I didn’t have the parking card needed to release me from the car park, I then remembered I hadn’t been given it back by the till operator.

Not a problem, you might think. I certainly didn’t think it was as I went back to the store to ask for either that card or another so that I get could get out of the car park.

Unfortunately, your staff at the Horsham branch of Sainsbury’s have shown themselves to be persistently aggressive both to me and to many other customers that I have observed in the seven years I have lived here. So, they did manufacture a very big problem indeed.

In the twenty years of living at my North London address and using Sainsbury’s and various other supermarkets, I never, ever, saw or experienced this consistently aggressive, controlling and idiotic behaviour that I have experienced at the Horsham branch of Sainsbury’s.

So your staff went out of their way to create a problem. This is exactly what happened.

I went to the customer help desk and explained I had lost my parking card somewhere between the till and now and couldn’t, therefore, get out of the car park. I showed my receipt which showed I had just spent £41.

The customer service person, one ‘Michelle’ (she refused to provide her surname so rather stupidly cannot be properly identified as an individual) sent someone off to the till I had used to retrieve the card. This person came back saying there was no sign of the card.

This idiotic customer service person, then asked me to pay ten pounds to be released from the car park ( I had the receipt, only a few minutes old, showing I had spent £41). When I pointed this out, she then asked for a £5 fee to be paid for a lost card. I pointed out that I had not lost it, but that the till operator had failed to return it to me and that I distinctly remembered exactly what had happened and how she had apparently forgotten to return it.

This Michelle person became instantly aggressive and hectoring and quite shrill, doing what all brain dead bureaucrats do in imagining she was doing her job properly and obeying the ‘rules’ relating to car parking; and failing utterly to use one solitary brain cell to understand that what she was doing was an utter parody of what Sainsbury’s intend in the management of their car park.

When I protested that this was ludicrous, this person was very, very, unpleasant, argumentative and unyielding.

She was thoroughly rude and talked down to me in the most demeaning and unpleasant manner designed to humiliate me and show me she was excercising her ‘control freak’, power crazed mentality.

She absolutely insisted I pay up an extra fee, or remain trapped in the car park.

I was completely polite in every way in the manner I spoke to this person, and in the course of me remonstrating that it was ridiculous to demand a fee to allow me to leave the car park under the circumstances, I simply used an index finger to point in her general direction as I said I was adamant I would refuse to pay this wickedly oppressive fee.

This total idiot then instantly latched onto the (completely wrong) idea that I was being violent and aggressive simply by virtue of me pointing a finger to emphasise a point in a perfectly normal piece of human communications behaviour, where hands wave about in various ways while talking to other people – body language comprising well over 50% of communication and verbal language comprising as little as a mere 30% on occasion.

She instantly said , the minute I pointed this errant finger, downwards at the counter as it happens, that she was refusing to speak to me because “I was being violent and abusive” (which I absolutely was not) and told me she was calling the manager and grabbed the ‘phone in a dramatic fashion as though she was about to be physically attacked, and then called for the manager.

How you can you say I was “violent and abusive” for simply pointing a finger to emphasise I was absolutely adamant I would not pay this extortion, I cannot imagine.

What is clear to me is that this dim woman has got it into her head that anyone pointing a finger or generally gesturing with hands, is being aggressive and therefore can be restrained, attacked, thrown out of a store or even, perhaps arrested and charged with violent assault. I am not merely being flippant or exaggerating here, because all of those things follow on from a true situation of a person being actually genuinely threatened with a real threat of violence.

In this case it was entirely in the fevered, politically correct, childish, and immensely stupid little brain of a completely inadequate person who made it plain she thinks anyone pointing a finger in this manner is fair game to be accused of aggression and violence.

The duty manger, Mr Paul or Peter Stares, appeared and immediately made things worse.

Without the slightest attempt to find out what had been going on he said “you shouldn’t be shopping here” and told me I had been banned from the store and told me to leave.

I told him leaving this lunatic place was the only thing I wished to do right now but I was being prevented as Sainsbury’s were apparently determined to keep me trapped in the car park. I also informed him it was completely untrue I had ever been banned from Sainsburys.

This banning was another fiction your aggressive staff had erroneously dreamt up a year ago which was the subject of my previous complaint to you on June 17 2008; whereby Sainsbury’s had apologised to me for this being untrue.

Mr Stares then asked the customer service person (Michelle) for a car park release card so I could leave. She told him she did not possess any as she had run out of them.

This, then, would seem to the reason she had behaved in this disgusting and appalling manner towards me in the first place. The stupid woman didn’t have a card to give me, so this led her into this dreadful torrent of abuse by her, artificially constructed in her little pea brain and furthered by a completely brain dead idea that anyone using a finger to gesticulate with in the course of a conversation is being aggressive and abusive.

Frankly, I am nauseated by all this and I wonder what you might like to do about it.

I am forced to use Sainsbury’s whether I like it or not, and I am sick and tired of the horrendous attitudes of your staff, who seem to have lost all sense of reason and understanding of normal, decent, civilised behaviour. And I am now left wondering, every time I shop in Sainsbury’s, whether you staff are going to attack me and cause a scene again as they obviously have the habit of doing.

It occurs to me the only explanation for this unusual and rather weird behaviour of staff is quite likely to be the constant brainwashing they receive from Sainsbury’s under the guise of ‘training’ – where Sainsbury’s are ‘training’ staff into a ‘them and us’ mentality. ‘Them’ being those irritating customers that “us’ at Sainsbury’s need to have complete control over to obey Sainsbury’s every whim.

That is certainly the message that unequivocally comes across as I routinely see other customers humiliated by Sainsbury’s staff; in particular by being persecuted by Sainsbury’s staff when customers use the Sainsbury’s car park while they do their shopping.

I frequently see people trapped at the exit barrier being refused to be able to leave by ‘security’ people who constantly go on about how they are ‘just obeying the rules’ when people who are clearly shoppers and not people misusing the car park are trapped at the barrier, which then causes a huge queue to form as every one else cannot leave the car park either. It is a disgusting way to treat your customers.

I find all of this deeply disturbing and completely unacceptable.

Parents Abandoning Children to Work

Poisonous seduction of consumer society greed for more, and more, and more; more of everything; – except happiness and contentment !

I think that running a home with kids and doing it properly is a full time job. If you did a proper, scientific study of the real and actual hours needed to do the job I wonder how many hours a week that would be. Does anyone know ?

I’m willing to bet it is going to be more than the notional forty hours of a typical working week.

And before this is considered, I think the average ‘modern’ idea of what is involved in running a home with kids is a bit peculiar because people have become so lazy they simply don’t do half the things they should be doing anyway.

Like cooking real meals with real food instead of micro waving that expensive ready made rubbish from the supermarket.

If running a home properly is a full time job, then it follows that an expectation of both parents having another full time job outside the home will cause problems, reducing the quality of family life and producing stress on the whole family.

There seems to be a quaint notion that as long as kids are fed and watered and dumped somewhere to be ‘looked after’ by some disinterested establishment providing ‘child minding’ services that is perfectly fine.

Parents are then free to work.

But the damage caused by the entire nation being gradually brainwashed over the past five decades into abandoning any idea of running family homes properly and looking after kids the way nature intended they be looked after – mostly by parents, is incredible.

This is the main cause of the current generation of children as a whole generating a tidal wave of violence, crime and general dysfunction and a workforce so ill educated, miserable, and lacking in work ethic, common sense or initiative, that it is next to useless.

I am utterly appalled at the way children are neglected as they are brought up surrounded by a conspiracy of consumer greed carefully nurtured by dimwitted governments and big business constantly poisoning people’s minds with persuasive brain-dead marketing lies.

This corrupting nonsense is now so embedded in the national psyche that the Government thinks it sounds perfectly reasonable to imagine that all single parents could somehow find the time to have a full time job and look after children alone; and that both parents in a two parent household should also both work full time, using all that money they earn to ‘dump’ the kids on some ‘child minder’ somewhere.

Never mind it causes immense psychological damage to the children and parents as well as frequently causing demonstrable physical damage too.

The way this country expects to bring up children is sick. Just look at the results !