Corporations don't learn from mistakes...

...they just pretend they do. A few years ago, Sainsburys was doing very nicely. It had always been viewed as a slightly more superior supermarket than Tesco (although perhaps not quite as upmarket as Waitrose and, to some extent, Marks & Spencer) and all was rosy as the traditionally middle class market that Sainsburys attracted was affluent and willing to spend on premium products. But then it all started to go wrong. An incredibly stupid decision by Sainsburys back in November 2000 to outsource their IT to a large firm (Accenture) backfired when a new stock control system was a total disaster and left the shelves bare. I'm not going to talk about the evils of outsourcing, a triumph of hope over experience which many companies continue to do in the foolish belief that they really will get a better service for less money, because that could take up an entire book. No, I'm going to talk about how Sainsburys have tried to recover from the effects of this catastrophically stupid decision.

Obviously, after dropping such a huge bollock that they had to post their first ever loss, the first thing a big company has to do is blame someone and fire them and then hope like buggery that whoever they employ next manages to turn things around. Mind you, at least the next incumbent didn't have to worry about IT as the CEO, Justin King, announced a campaigned entitled Getting The Basics Right, the core of which was to hire an extra 3,000 shelf stackers. Since that time, there have been rumblings now and again about issues at Sainsburys: Losing market share, subsequent loss of revenue and so on and I can tell you why.

First off, I'll say that once upon a time I was a Tesco devotee. This is probably because I grew up in an are which Tesco had stitched up from top to bottom to the exclusion of any other big supermarkets (north Cambridge, if you're interested) and I, like many of my peers at school, had a Saturday job there. And it was pretty good too - the money was better than average, I enjoyed what I did, we got paid holiday and there was a good, subsidised canteen. However, after graduating and moving to south Birmingham I discovered that there was no easily accessible Tesco in my area (at least not a decent sized one) so I started to shop at Sainsburys. This was 1998 and I had been shopping at Sainsburys for the last year of my degree so I wasn't too bothered about where I got my food from so long as it wasn't Safeway (full of dole bludgers) or Kwik Save (so pikey, even the local winos wouldn't go in for cheap tramp juice).

When, a few years later, I moved to the South West (east Bristol), I had another choice to make. There was a giant Asda hypermarket more or less on the doorstep or I could drive a few miles to the nearest Sainsburys (again, no Tesco within a sensible distance although there are several decent sized ones in Bristol itself). Given that Asda was inhabited by obese, shuffling, dead-eyed chavs wearing velour leisure wear with inappropriate slogans like 'Active' or 'Sexy' plastered across their corpulent arses, Sainsburys was an instant winner. But I started to notice the supply issues soon after (not surprising as it was about this time that the board realised they just performed the impressively moronic trick of making a very large amount of money disappear into the pockets of incompetent and cretinous consultancy firms for next to fuck all result at the other end). This was all the more surprising since this particular store was almost literally within shouting distance (and by that I mean no more than half a mile) from a huge Sainsburys distribution centre and yet the shelves were regularly empty. After the embarrassing admissions, the sacrificial offering of the head of supply chain and lots of promises, I, like many others I guess, assumed that all would soon be well.

But no. Three years on and all is still not well. I have no idea if the company really did employ another 3,000 shelf stackers or not, but all the shelf stackers in the world will not help if you do not have the right products being delivered at the right time. Generally speaking I do my supermarket shopping on the way home from work as the store is only a short detour from my normal route home, so I'm usually there at about 6pm on a Monday or Tuesday. I can almost guarantee that I won't get several items because I shop at this time. I have been in on a normal Tuesday evening before now and there has been not one piece of fresh chicken on the shelves, no whole milk of any kind (and I personally prefer organic - something which I will come back to shortly). There's no point in looking for fresh bread and more often than not there will be at least one or two other items I intend to get that I can't. If this were the day or two before Christmas or Easter then perhaps it would be understandable, if not acceptable, as people do seem to buy obscenely large amount of food before these holidays and it must be tricky keeping the shelves full when the products are more or less taken straight off the pallets by the customers. But it isn't: This is an ordinary week night, so why is it that I can't get basic products like chicken, milk and fresh bread? The few staff that do seem to be around (maybe they didn't hire 3,000 extra staff after all) are all utterly gormless, disinterested and generally useless.

I mentioned organic milk for a reason. I prefer it to the rather bland homogenised pap that most people seem happy to buy but my beef here is that Sainsburys never, ever, have organic milk that isn't short dated. Tesco do. Asda do. even Morrisons do, so why the bloody hell can't Sainsburys manage it? And it's not just in my area. My sister, who lives in Northern Ireland, buys organic milk because it contains higher levels of Omega 3 fatty acids which is apparently good for the brain development of kids and she, her child minder and one of my cousins have all said, independently of each other, that they find the same problem with Sainsburys over there and they have to go to Tesco or Marks and Spencer's instead.

As if this wasn't enough there's then the issue of these new self-checkouts (maybe I should have been more wary of a Sainsburys IT project?). I have seen and used them in Tesco and Asda as well and they seem to be fine there, apart from the fact that most of the people who queue up in front of me to use them are the kind of morons who have problems with an on-off switch, so quite why they think they can operate one of these is a mystery. All they achieve is to slow down the whole process as they dither, generally make a hash of things or try and stuff their debit card into the receipt slot. The Only reason I use them is because it means I don't have to converse with a spotty, slack-jawed checkout monkey who stares at the keypad as I try to type in my PIN surreptitiously. However, Good old J Sainsbury & Co have taken things one step further.

Yesterday, a busy Saturday morning, two of the four checkouts were out of order. After waiting for the usual assortment of old people, students paying with shrapnel and dribbling idiots to clear off, it was my turn. First, I had to obtain a bag from the carelessly thrown stack on top of the machine, there because the assistant couldn't be arsed to put them in the packing area holders like they're supposed to. So, when I got one and put it on the holders so it would stay open, the machine instantly complained that there was an unexpected item in the packing area and sulkily refused to do anything more. I was sorely tempted to give it another unexpected item, only this time it would have been my size twelve boot at high speed. Instead, I kept my cool, the assistant finally pressed some sort of button and it graciously let me scan my shopping.

I found that: There was more than one kind of new potatoes in the system but only one kind had a picture. When it was selected however, it would ask me how many I had which clearly wasn't right. It seems that the right button was a cryptically named one with no image on it. Obviously. It whinged that I hadn't scanned things properly and that items weren't found. But best of all was the last item. I had bought a 9 roll pack (plus 3 free!) of Andrex which clearly isn't going to fit in a carrier bag or my rucksack, me having walked since it was a nice day I'm doing my bit to reduce my car usage. It scanned fine and there is an option on screen you can press to 'skip bagging', evidently for items such as this so that the till doesn't complain that it expected something in the bagging area but didn't see it (although this mystifies me: Why does it matter? If you've scanned it, you're paying for it so why should it complain if it doesn't go into the bagging area? Surely it is much more sensible to complain if something appears which wasn't scanned). Anyhoo, I pressed 'skip bagging' and proceeded to get my wallet out to pay when a big message flashed up on screen telling me that I needed store approval to skip bagging, despite already having skipped bagging for heavy items which were going in the rucksack without any complaint whatsoever. Store approval. For me to not try and put 12 rolls of bum rag in a carrier bag. Are you serious?

Apparently so. It would not let me pay until some operator had come over and said yes, that's OK. This is absolutely absurd. Why in the name of all that is sensible do I need to permission to not bag some bog roll? What's worse is that when I turned to the operator to get this done, she was deep in converstaion with two colleagues and a customer who had bought the wrong cream to make a cake with. It took three of them to try and decide that soured cream was defintiely the wrong choice and that she'd need something else. "No shit? Now could one of you mouth breathers come and press this damn button so I can get the hell out of here."* It would seem not as they then had to have a debate about which is the right cream while I stood there rapidly approaching the point when I am likely to chin someone, waiting to pay and with the queue getting bigger and bigger. Eventually some pustulant youth came over and grudginly stabbed a pudgy finger at some pictograms and swiped a dog-eared card which allowed me to pay and get the hell out of there.

So, the great 'mystery' as to why Sainsburys are losing custom can be summed up pretty simply: Poor service, poor availability of goods and unhelpful, surly and generally stupid staff. But it can't be hard to do; after all, Asda, Tesco, Morrisons and the rest manage all right and their staff are probably no better paid and have to wear equally repugnant uniforms and yet they mange to be helpful and they and their managers keep the shelves stocked with the right products. Sadly, I have little choice but to use Sainsburys, although I try and buy meat and veg from an excellent farm shop near my office and at weekends I try to make an effort to go to Waitrose who are by far and away the best quality supermarket with the best social conscience, if a little pricey. I also try and use farmers markets (the meat and veg is better from markets and small shops as supermarket veg is grown for shelf life, not flavour, and the meat is grown for big margins, not real quality). Until the day Sainsburys really grab the nettle and tackle these problems systematically and sensibly, they will continue to lose favour with the public. Maybe with talk of a takeover (after all, they are ripe for it) things will improve. I hope so because it would be a shame to lose such a big and once proud player.

Sorry this has turned out to be so long a post - I had no idea it would be such a diatribe, but supermarkets constantly irritate me and although I am doing what I can to give my business to alternative providers which helps cut down on the choke hold supermarkets have on the producers, I still have to use them from time to time so I think I have a right to expect decent service from them and I am therefore quite passionate about it. Anyway, if you've had particularly bad or good experiences with Sainsburys or any other chain, let me know (keep it clean please - no libellous stuff).

Listening to: Wes Straub - Insistence

* I didn't really say that, but I wanted to.