The Scandalous Case Of The Bagged Bananas

I suppose at this time of year we all do more than our fair share of shopping.

Having finished work on December 2 I've had quite a bit of time to get my plans in order to shop for Richards family and relatives and our friends.

It's time of year when you see the best and worst of customer service. Regular readers of my blog will know it is something that I can all too easily clamber onto my soapbox to rant about.

So let me highlight a couple of this year's winners and losers.

Marks & Spencer seem to be well up there with trying to make it easier for the customer. They've got a new online delivery system whereby you can order the items online and if you don't want to wait in for delivery, or indeed pay for a delivery charge, you can have them delivered to a branch that you designate at the time of ordering and pick them up from there.

I did that with a couple of items and there they were waiting for me in the Croydon Marks & Spencer yesterday afternoon.

Twitter also plays a wonderful role for the clever shopper.The app red laser will help you find the cheapest price - and the app itself is free.

 I picked out a cardigan from my mother in Marks in Croydon yesterday afternoon. It was the last size 12 of that particular cardigan that they had in stock, so it was with much disappointment that I discovered when I got to the till that it had a couple of threads pulled on one shoulder. I tweeted my frustration and within hours Marks & Spencer's had picked up the tweet and asked me to send them the product number of the cardigan and the size that I wanted and they would check the stock in all nearby stores and get back to me. I picked one up in Covent Garden this afternoon. Absolutely excellent service. Well done Marks & Spencer.

Not so good Amazon. A brilliant site with a massive range of goods at really competitive prices. However the price is only really competitive if you decide to have the free delivery option. This means that the choice you have over delivery is not yours and they do use some truly dreadful couriers. I've had problems before with larger items not making it here, and of course if you have a life and need to leave the house for a few hours, you can guarantee that that's when delivery will take place.

Not my new coffee machine however. It never arrived at all. They were using a courier firm called Yodel  - yes you got it right - a firm named after a strangulated noise made in the Swiss Alps. At least called Yodel you'd expect it to be on time

Despite several assurances from really good people on the Amazon customer service team the product was never delivered when they said it would be. Amazon also stop the facility they used to have where you could reply by e-mail to the customer service person you've dealt with, so that each time you ring up now you are dealt with by another operative who has to start the case from the beginning. They don't seem to know what's going on. Although you're given a tracking number, when you log onto the Yodel website, you can see where your package supposedly is, but there is no way of contacting the courier to check this, or to reschedule your delivery.

Not that I ever got a delivery. Eventually I got Amazon to agree to refund the whole product and I popped down the road and bought it from Currys. Only £4.99 more which was less than the cost of delivery would have been fromAmazon. Lesson learnt.

It would seem that even Amazon however were defeated by their courier on this occasion, as supposedly having stopped the item, it turned up at 8:35 PM on Sunday night during the X factor final. While anything proved a worthwhile distraction from the gargantuan monolith that is now the X factor  -dull, dull, dull,-the fact that the couriers didn't even know the delivery had been cancelled spoke volumes.

There was a whole feature on Yodel on Radio Four's "You and Yours" one day the previous week and believe me I'm not the only person who has found their service less than satisfactory.

I do have to give Apple a mention.

On every occasion that we visited the Apple Store this year, with a laptop problem, a cracked iPhone screen, or to make a purchase, the level of customer service has amazed us.

However my award for this week for an unpleasant shopping experience has to go, I'm afraid, to Waitrose. Our branch in Beckenham has recently undergone "modernisation".  This means that they have taken a delightful store which had lovely wide aisles and was always a pleasant shopping experience, and crammed more shelves into it. So we now have narrower vegetable aisles, narrower meat aisles, and a very large John Lewis household section which is absolutely empty of customers. They're all busy fighting their way round the half of the store that sells food.

Having watched Panorama the previous Monday about just what supermarkets are doing to get more money out of us, we did a little experiment. We took a bag of essential Waitrose bananas priced at £2.39p and put it on the scale to see what it would cost as a bunch of loose bananas.

The answer surprised even us. In fact it shocked me. The cost of those bananas was actually 50 p!!

So the moral of this story is don't go near prepackaged fruit and vegetables in your supermarket. And if, like my mother, what you get in your stocking is an apple and an orange (her memories of a childhood Christmas!) - make sure they are loose ones.

Happy Christmas