They might as well have that title in a large banner merrily drapped over the entrance to the store. Quite why wifey continues to shop there when Sainsbury’s treat her like crap every single time she goes I’ll never know.
I’ve never understood why the number of disabled bays outnumbers the parent and child parking by a factor of about 3 to 1, are there really that many more disabled people in this country than people with children under 5? Not that it matters of course, as disabled people will often park in parent and child spaces if it means a reduced walk to the store.
It’s not easy shopping with a baby at the best of times but we’ll always go if possible at a time when the shops aren’t rammed with people. We’re considerate like that. Unlike the vast majority of middle aged arseholes who see weakness in mother and child combinations and exploit this ruthlessly to push in front of people at the checkout.
Of course these people can only get away with this because Sainsbury’s let them. All it would take is one checkout operative with manners to say, “excuse me this lady was first” to make things better but they’d probably be sacked. You see, Sainsbury’s seem to think it’s more important to have 3 or 4 people with snazzy looking headsets on chatting to each other at a badly named “customer service” booth than actually opening tills or, you know, actually providing customer service.
Wifey has this to say about the latest response she got to an astounding piece of queue jumping:
At that moment the till supervisor comes over, I explain what has happened and how cross I am and how this seems to frequently happen when I shop here. It has never happened at Tescos. ‘It this time of year love, nothing we can do’. Well actually, yes there is something that you can do. YOU CAN OPEN ANOTHER TILL.
Fortunately we are blessed with an Asda, a Waitrose, a Morrisons and a Tesco only a 5 minute drive further than the Sainsbury’s at London Colney, so I would heartily recommend to anyone reading this in the St Albans area that they consider shopping at one of the other stores over this poorly managed shambolic mess. Because oddly, even given the different demographics of customers, we’ve never had this sort of trouble at any other supermarket.
And there you have it, if you are on the board of Sainsbury or are a large influential pension fund manager bemoaning the declining market share Sainsbury has, drop me a line, email address on the right, and we can discuss appointing my wife as an executive director because she knows why £11m of shoppers money has fled Sainsbury’s in the 3 months to November, and she knows how to put it right. It’s not going to cost millions, it’s just about making sure the staff look after customers and treat people fairly.