This is a message aimed at anyone considering what online supermarket to use. Timeline of events of our recent experience with Tesco Online: 1. Move into new house with girlfriend. 2. Realise there is no big supermarket nearby so decide to go with Tesco (first mistake) for a big one-off ‘set up’ shop – herbs, spices, tinned goods, kitchen utensils, etc. Based on reviews rather than any sort of incentives (of which there are none at the time of writing for new customers). 3. Spend over 2 hours on the clunky and cumbersome website adding things to the basket. Total comes to nearly £300 because we were enticed into a couple of good wine offers and we figured we’d stock up on heavy stuff. We definitely don’t want to have to go through the online journey again (it saves your last order so it’s much quicker to select the same goods again). Order it for 4-5pm Sunday evening. 4. By 5pm Sunday evening, it still hasn’t come so we ring customer services to ask what’s happened. Turns out the order was cancelled but a) they don’t know why and b) unbelievably we weren’t informed, even though the store would have known first thing in the morning. It’s now too late to re-order it or even go out and buy dinner as everywhere is closed, so pretty frustrated and left high and dry. The next time we are both in (I work out of town in the week) is the next weekend so we can’t just re-order it for the next day. We are also hesitant to re-order without knowing what exactly went wrong. Customer services says ring back tomorrow after they have spoken to the store in question. 5. Customer services also say it’s probably to do with the bank blocking my card due to the address change (would a criminal really order 2 of everything…?) which gets me worried that I won’t be able to travel to work the next morning as I use contactless. Make another call that evening to my bank who insist that nothing’s wrong and they can see that Tesco tried to request the payment which didn’t go through at their end so suggests it’s the Tesco system that has the problem. Disclaimer – not sure if banks can be open when it comes to fraud prevention processes, so hard to know for sure why the payment was blocked. 6. Rang customer services Monday evening. On hold to annoying music for 10 minutes. Spend 5 minutes explaining the situation again. No progress. They again suggest it’s my bank’s fault. They say they’ll speak to the store and claim the relevant manager’s been away. Says they’ll find out what happened and then I should call back as they’re obviously in the wrong and I’d be due some sort of gesture. 7. Rang customer services Wednesday evening. On hold again. Had to explain it all again. No progress. They offer to contact store directly. I’m put on hold 3 times as they have 3 numbers to try. The third one works and I’m put through to speak to a woman with a poor grasp of English who sort of apologises, says the warehouse got told not to load it up, admits fault for not contacting me, and says she’ll leave a note to make sure they definitely load the order next time. Transfers me back to customer services. 8. Given a) the amount of hassle caused, b) the fact that it was definitely mostly their fault (and possibly 100%) which the manager has just admitted, c) the size of the order, and d) the fact we’re genuinely looking for an online supermarket to use regularly, I was expecting a decent amount of compensation to be offered now that we’d got to the bottom of it. Nope. They offered me a tenner. I asked to speak to the customer services manager (again put on hold, again had to explain it all) and he didn’t budge either. So, I held my head up high and proud and said no… sadly that’s a lie. I took their pitiful offer but let me be crystal clear that the manual effort of creating that order again was a major factor and if it wasn’t for that then I would have just walked away and not given Tesco my money. 9. Noticed the next day that the price had gone up by about £20 as some of the offers had expired. Sigh. Back on hold. Customer services incredibly don’t have the ability to view the previous order to compare and reinstate the original offers (I work in tech and this would not be difficult) so she asked me to read through both orders and call back / send an email once I’d worked out the differences for each affected item. Comparing 2 lists of 200 items side by side and then doing the maths... I didn’t bother. 10. The order was probably 90% right. 11. I’m now sharing this story knowing that I’ll never use them again. I feel like talking about it is the big first step to getting over the trauma. It’s certainly been cathartic.