Price Watch

I have a bone to pick with Tesco! Yes, Tesco, the place I do my weekly shopping. I'm really a loyal customer of Tesco and I never go anywhere else cos for one thing the Tesco in-house products are of pretty good quality and cheap to boot. And secondly most of their products are reasonably priced.

As you all know from my previous posts that I do my weekly shopping there every weekend without fail. Both wifey and me are such regulars there that we know where all the products are located better than some of their own staff do.

We're such loyal customers that even if we do run short of groceries at home, we'll try our best to not go out to the nearby shops to buy stuff and will wait it out till the weekend. Doesn't always work out though cos the boys eat like there's no tomorrow and sometimes we have to go and get groceries from the nearby shop but you see what I mean about us being as loyal to them as we can.

And they've rewarded us by sending us discount vouchers and cash rebates for our continued support through their loyalty card programme. But there is one thing that really pisses me off about them and it's their price tags or rather the updating of their price tags.

Now, wifey and me practically know how much the cost of the usual things we buy are priced and whenever we see a promotion on any of those products, we'll grab a whole load of them cos the price gets really cheap (yes, you can call us hoarders ... LOL!). But more often than not, when we hit the cashier counters and they scan the goods for payment, it'll show the usual old price which is higher.

Then we'll have to go through the hassle of explaining to the cashier that the price displayed says it's cheaper than what is being shown on your display. This in turn will lead to the cashiers trying to locate a supervisor who in turn will have to go back to the isle to verify the displayed price (which they will normally honour) but the whole process will slow up everything.

If this was an isolated incident, then I wouldn't mind but it happens every god dammed week that it's beginning to piss me off big time. And it's not just one or two products. Wifey and me will always scan the items at the price checking machines to be sure of the price and it gets on my nerves when the cashier counters have different prices. Like I said, normally I'll always get the cheaper price in the end as it's their policy to honour what's stated on the price displays. We always check our receipts before we leave the store as well.

But what about those people who don't check the price and just pay whatever is shown on the cash register and don't bother checking their receipts. They would have ended up paying regular pricing for promotional goods and think how much money Tesco would make because of this. Now, I'm not saying Tesco does this intentionally but can't they at least update all their price list to be in sync with their promotional prices?

Not everyone is like wifey and me who scrutinize every detail of the bill and price check any product that we deem to be suspect, price wise. I'm not talking about 10 or 20 cents difference, sometimes it's a ringgit or two which is a heck of a lot if it happens to everyone. Imagine if everyone bought some of the best diet pills products that were on promotion and ended up paying the regular prices without even knowing it. It would in a way be a form of cheating, right?

This happens to us every week with the latest being yesterday. When I queried them, this guy had the cheek to say that I have to follow the price coding on the packaging and not the price that was displayed! That set me off, he got an earful from me with the end result being me demanding loudly to see his supervisor who in turn told me they would honour the cheaper price. Like as if I could read a bar code and know how much the price was, idiots!

Come on you guys at Tesco, please get your act together. I love shopping at your store. You have some great in-house products but the hassle of not knowing if the price displayed is the same as the price on the bar coding of the products can be a real pain and in the long run a source of losing out on your promotions if I'm not careful enough to price check each and everyone of your products before I head for the cashier counter. And please also hire some much more informed personnel who won't ask me to decipher those numbers and lines on your bar code to figure out the price!
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