Supermarket shopping: what gets on your nerves?

Self-service checkouts and long queues at those that are staffed are the most annoying feature of supermarkets for me.

The lack of unit prices on promotions such as ‘three for the price of two’ is annoying, since that is clearly done to make it difficult for customers to compare products. I can do mental arithmetic and get plenty of practice, but it should be illegal not to give unit prices on special offers.

Multi-buys on fresh produce irritate me and are unhelpful for single people. They encourage waste of food and increase the chance that food could be consumed beyond the ‘use by’ date. Some of the examples are ridiculous – in my local supermarket, cucumbers were 90p each or two for £1. I would like to see multi-buys banned on fresh food.

Being subjected to music, whether piped music or demonstration TVs, stereo systems etc. is a nuisance.

Having dietary requirements, my biggest bugbear is supermarkets that stop selling products that we rely on usually made by smallish manufacturers.

I used to drink So-Good Oat Milk. Supermarkets did not keep enough on the shelves so that every time there was a delivery, it went very quickly and the shelf would be empty for the next week so I would buy as much as I could when it was available. Because the supermarkets did not keep their shelves regularly stocked, they claimed they did not sell enough to make it worth them selling it, and So-Good bit the dust in 2011.

As I can’t drink soya, I struggled for a couple of years to find a milk substitute the consistency of semi-skimmed milk until Koko (originally Kara) Coconut milk appeared.

Now it looks like Koko is going down the same road as So-Good.

I have been struggling to buy Koko. Only Tesco and Ocado now stock the fresh version. Alpro (Dean Foods) seem to have muscled their way into the supermarkets and Koko are being pushed out. The Alpro coconut milk is nowhere near as good as Koko.

So please supermarkets, put Fresh Koko Coconut Milk back on the shelves. You have the power to keep a much-needed company in business.

Self service checkouts, the next one to work for me without some anomaly will be the first.
Lot’s of unmanned normal checkouts when the store is obviously busy.
Confusing and unnecessary price offers. rather than “two for one” just drop the price you’ll sell more probably, certainly to people who didn’t need or want two in the first place.
The term “associates” for people who work there, if you want to make them feel better about their job pay them a decent wage rather than give them a fancy meaningless title.
The screens at the tobacco counter, pointless. I don’t even smoke but the delays these things cause to both those buying tobacco and the people waiting in line behind is totally unnecessary. It achieves nothing.

In the future the demise of, or charging for, the plastic carrier bag will annoy me. They are very useful and have many secondary uses. Never ever has one of mine added to general litter or killed a Dolphin. Rather than getting rid of something useful like a carrier bag do something about all the unnecessary packaging enveloping so much of what we buy, a far more significant problem.

Constantly moving things round the store. That even affects the stores online packers as they then have to wander the store looking for things.

Multi buys on perishables, just cos the supermarket is trying to shift stock, what’s wrong with 50% off instead of BOGOF etc.

Labels being wrong ( inaccurate unit prices or special offers; 58p each 2 for £1.50 )
No price on the shelf ( missing labels)
The label not matching the product.

Un-engaged staff, you report an issue and its never their job to do anything about it and they won’t find someone who;s job it is to deal with it. aka Jobsworths.

Never enough manned checkouts at busy times.

Self service machines that clearly cold never have been tested prior to release. Unexpected item in bagging area, No fool that’s the shopping I just scanned.

Not sure if this is just my local Tesco , but the fruit and veg is questionable at times. Sometimes already mouldy on the shelf.

I must be very lucky with my local Tesco. Most staff are friendly and helpful, there is no unbearable piped “music”, the shop is clean and tidy, plenty of tills open, busy but well managed self-service checkouts, fresh produce, shelves well stocked and so on.

When I go elsewhere my bugbear is music of any sort. This is my bugbear everywhere actually, not just in supermarkets but also in shopping malls, in the breakfast room in hotels, at the restaurant, amplified buskers in the street (nothing wrong with a bagpipe or an acoustic guitar and a human voice), shops with loudspeakers blaring out into the street, etc, etc, etc. There is enough unavoidable noise pollution around as it is without adding to it.

My biggest gripe is when non UK bornstaff talk to each other in their own language at check-out ignoring the customer.

1 Self service check-outs. We should all boycott them. Don’t young people realise that they are doing their peers out of jobs?
2 Background music. I don’t want this as I shop! People who want it can provide their own.
3 Staff engaging me in conversation. They have obviously been told they must do this and they find it as difficult to ask me as I do to respond. The weather and generalities are fine. I realise that for lots of older people this might be the only human interaction they get all day. But the more specific/personal, “what have you got planned for this afternoon?” are out of bounds. My husband suggested we should say something like, “Well, we are planning to make a p*** movie this afternoon.” The only thing that stops us is our sympathy for the check-out staff who clearly are as reluctant to ask us these questions as we are to answer them…

I’d like to see trolleys equipped with scanners to both check prices and to keep a tally on your purchasing. It can be irritating to have a discount voucher with limited life – say £5 off a £50 spend – only to arrive at the till having spent £49.98.

Lets see…

Staff who decide the moment you move towards a shelf to lift an item is the ideal time to push in front of you to start organising that precise area of shelving.

Customers who use their trolley as a blockade to stop you getting to anything on the shelves near them while they spend 5 minutes studying the contents of a pot of yogurt oblivious to what’s going on around them, though I find a gentle nudge of the trolley with my hip towards them usually has the desired affect. And on a similar note customers who hold their trolley at arms length with one hand across an isle while lifting something from a shelf, I’ve yet to work that one out.

Poor stocking of basics. There is certain days in my local supermarkets that you can be sure that there’ll be no milk or bread on the shelves yet if you ask there’ll be trucks full of them out in the stores.

Being allowed to describe fruit and veg with terms like “sweet and juicy”, when sweet means like sucking a lemon and juicy means something looking like a raisin, or “ready to eat” which seems to mean it’ll be ripe about a week after it’s gone rotten and you’ve binned it.

I hate to say it but people collecting for charity by bagging your shopping. It got so bad in my local Sainsburys at one point that no matter what day of the week you went shopping someone would be there to pack your bags. It wouldn’t have been so bad if they were even capable of packing, because obviously bread, eggs etc goes in the bottom and tins and other heavy items should always be thrown in on top! I started to pay them not to pack, they still insisted on standing getting in the way however. I suspect it may have been a ploy to get me to use self checkout tills, it worked.

Not getting help to pack bags at checkout. In some countries it is standard practice for the till operator to bag stuff. It is just as easy for them to put an item in a bag on a stand in front of them than onto a bench for the shopper to bag while also getting the money/vouchers/loyalty cards etc sorted out. I feel really embarrassed holding up queues when I am still struggling with bagging after they’ve rung everything up, but this is because they probably put the squashy items through first (bread, soft veg etc) instead of at the end and there is no point in my buying this stuff if it will be a ruined mess by the time I get it home.
I hate self checkout as well as they always seem to need staff intervention.
Paying for trolleys and struggling with baskets when I don’t have the requisite coin to hand.
No complaints about the staff at my local Sainsburys in terms of their general pleasantness and helpful attitudes, just with the systems they are working with.

Oh yes, and I really agree with Terfar – women who only START to delve in their bag for their purse after they have packed every last thing. Did they not realise they would have to pay? They could have found that and put it next to the card machine, like I do, ready to use without inconveniencing other customers!

Over the last four weeks we have made 7 trips to 3 different supermarkets – on checking my paper till receipt, we found we had been overcharged on 5 of those trips at two of the supermarkets – that’s what I don’t like about supermarket shopping!

I am happy to use self-service check-outs and also contactless payment for a faster check-out but I hate where I get errors which ends up delaying me longer – “unexpected item in bagging area” or flashing red lights is not a good experience. More work is needed to make these solutions a smooth experience.

What annoys me most about supermarkets, particularly the big two, is their carefree attitude to allergen labelling. Recently I purchased a Sainsbury’s red and yellow pepper stir fry. Every one of the listed ingredients was a vegetable, and yet the warning still said it was not suitable for sufferers of peanut, nut sesame, milk, egg, celery, wheat, mustard or soya allergies. That kind of blanket labelling smacks of “covering themselves” and is not very helpful to those of us that do actually suffer from allergies.

The lack of plant-based foods. Especially plant-based ready meals for when you are really busy. Always Meat Cheese Meat Cheese etc. When they make meat-free stuff and still put egg or milk in – like veggie sausages lately – why? They put milk and egg (powders usually) in everything too – and usually if they took that one unnecessary ingredient out in most foods then it makes it purchasable. Some stores are getting better but there is a long way to go. Very frustrating.