A Fruitless Search: The Reasons Why Supermarkets are Failing

• I want to buy a can of soup and not worry that it might be half price at the next store. A pot of Tesco Finest fresh soup is £2.40 in one store, and 2 for £2 in another. What the hell? 

• All these silly offers. Cut the crap, and just cut pounds. I don’t need to be confused into whether it’s cheaper to buy peppers individually or in a pack of three or five, and I don’t need three packs of butter in my fridge. With the nation wasting 15 millions tonnes of uneaten food each year, don’t persuade me to buy more than one to get the best deal - just lower the price for one. Give straight discounts and show some self-respect.

• A trip round Tesco metro takes me 45 minutes so don’t get me started on the huge superstores. I want to nip in, find what I want and pay for it, without being led round each display counters, past the pyramid of Philadelphia cheese on offer, and zig zag up every aisle just to find ten items.

• Vouchers. Why on earth do I want a voucher for 5p off strawberry yoghurt? I don’t even eat strawberry yoghurt! They might aim to save you some money on your next shop, but I was really hoping on leaving and never coming back until your receipt machine printed off five different vouchers - money off my first online shop, bonus points for fuel, money off the next time I buy a 5kg bag of rice (just bought one and probably won’t need one for another year), and even more maddening, a voucher telling me how much I could have saved elsewhere. You get my point. 

• Staff who don’t know their aisle 2 from their aisle 32. ‘In the olden days…’ store staff would know your first name, and your ‘usual’ shopping items. They’d know that you came in to shop at exactly 10:30am on a Saturday, and how you like your ham carved. Now it’s just a generation waiting until they can clock out who don’t know much about the produce that they’re selling - I’ve had to describe okra and quinoa to hapless school drop-outs many a time. Waitrose actually succeeds in giving the impression that the staff actually quite like food.

• ‘Ripen at home’. Oh come on! I’d like to find one person who’s never bought a cheaper ‘ripen at home’ avocado and it actually ripened into a soft and creamy avocado. Selling ‘ripe and ready’ fruit at a premium is a joke. The fact that these bananas/plums/nectarines/avocados are 50p cheaper just so you can have it sitting in your fruit basket going from rock-solid to mouldy overnight is obscene.

• No one gives a shit about self-service checkouts. Whilst it was fun five years ago as a teen to ‘scan all your shopping yourself’, the appeal has severely withered away. Despite the fact I am young and tech-savvy, rarely are there any staff attending the self-service checkouts and usually I am stuck in a queue halfway up an aisle whilst the elderly jab at the screens, attempting to swipe a bar code without listening to the instruction that an item has been removed from the bagging area. I know, I know, the machines are over-sensitive and play up and I have been caught out several times, but why have them? You want us to do the job for you but you have to do it anyhow. When you could just be putting more staff on the regular tills. As for “ten items or less” it is “fewer”. Fewer!