Posted on by loveleyjoy

IT DOESN’T ADD UP!

Every week we get supermarket flyers in our mailbox. One shop regularly offered a 4 euro reduction voucher if 40 euros was spent in their store. We made it into a regular weekly activity.

My husband is excellent at mental arithmetic so it was his job to total up the purchases until we got just slightly over the target amount. It would not have been profitable to spend 50 euros as the 10 % would only have been 8 1/2 % off. (I told you he was good at mental arithmetic!)

The problem was that our calculations and the shop’s calculations were rarely the same. We would arrive at the tills to find that we were either 20c short and had to quickly run, so as not to annoy those in the queue behind us, and find a packet of peanuts to bring us up to and over the thresh-hold or we were over and buying more than we needed;

We soon learnt to take a pencil and a paper on which to list the items and their prices so we could see where we had gone wrong. However, when we checked the till receipt against our list we could see that each week several items were marked at one price on the shelf and another price at the tills.

In France, as in the UK, the law is clear. A shop must sell any product at the price shown on the shelf label, if that is less than the price at the till. We would regularly point out these discrepancies to the staff especially if we were being overcharged.

Eventually, I had a collection of till receipts that I had annotated with the errors . I scanned several and wrote to the shop’s headquarters.

In the post I received a letter of apology and a voucher for 5 or 10 euros – I can’t remember which.

When I next did some shopping and presented the ‘bon d’achat’ the lady on the till looked at it with astonishment. She asked where I had got it from. I replied that it had come from her shop’s headquarters. ‘ I’ve worked here for 10 years, but I’ve never seen one of these before’.

It was then that I realised that French customers rarely bother to complain.

The manager got more and more irritated with us pointing out the errors. One day He angrily took my paper out of my hand, disappeared for several minutes and reappeared having changed all the wrong labels, saying ‘There, they are all correct now!’

That shop closed down soon after – the whole chain disappeared from France. I would think that competition with Aldi and Lidl had become impossible. The manager now works for one of our favourite stores which is also a German owned chain. I was a bit nervous of contact but always said ‘hello’. He greeted me with a friendly reply one day when I complimented him for watering the plants on sale – something that rarely happens in any shop. He now greets me with a nod of acknowledgement. I expect he has realised that the management of his former chain did not make life easy for their staff. Working for a German chain is probably a lot less stressful. We can say hand on heart that we have never found any discrepancies between the shelf prices and the till prices in any of the several chains that have taken over France, and the world, with their legendary teutonic efficiency.

Posted on by loveleyjoy

FINALLY A LETTER TO THE MANAGER

In today’s computerised world you would think that the pricing of products in a supermarket would be easy. Bar codes are on every packet – all that is necessary is for the cashier to scan the item. However, we were continuing to find errors at every visit. Baby Bel cheeses were priced at 30c each. I put six in a bag and was charged 1.99 not 1.80 – a 10% overcharge. This chain had 175 stores. Over a month the store is making 1,000 euros extra for just 10 sales a day. But French people don’t complain.

The following incident probably illustrates why. One day a little recipe book was on offer just inside the entrance. It was marked as ‘FREE’. When I went to pay, I was charged 1.49c for it. Yet another trip to the Customer Service desk ‘A’ where 5 people were in a queue in front of two assistants. Two more assistants were there but were positioned well back as if they were not available. When I got to the head of the queue and asked for my refund, ‘Pas ici, Madame, c’est mon collègue‘. So I moved to the back of the queue B. I got my refund, but it was put onto my loyalty card. I wanted to have cash in hand rather than risk them taking away my points. But this lady could not give back cash so it was again, ‘Pas ici, Madame, c’est mon collègue‘.Back to queue A and 25 minutes in total to achieve a cash refund of something that was free – if you had the supermarket’s own cash card!

Another time, we saw a rabbit pen advertised in the supermarket brochure that arrived weekly in our letterbox.The price was reduced to tempt us to buy it and we had a rabbit! We went down the road, found the product and paid. However, the price was more than marked in the brochure. I pointed out the discrepancy to the assistant. She showed me where it was written SUPERMARKET NORTHERN BRANCH. Now, we lived 600 metres from the SOUTHERN BRANCH and 8 kilometres from the northern branch.It seemed incredible that the northern branch had different prices and that they bothered to put publicity leaflets in letterboxes so close to the southern branch. Unless it was done on purpose to trick people.

That was the final straw and the last red rag to the bull. A letter to the manager was called for listing all the irritations we had suffered. Another one was that people having the stores own credit card went to reserved tills. Other customers were in long queues while the cashiers at the reserved ones sat and did nothing. A type of apartheid. Also if you took a basket and put more than 10 items in it the assistant would tell you off. I thought I was a good customer if I went for 6 items and came back with 12!!

Anyway, the letter was sent and I received a surprising reply. All will be revealed!