Downside to discounts if you shop in the German stores

MUCH has been said in the past few weeks in particular about about the two smaller German supermarkets and their gain in trade from the ‘big four’.

There has also been a lot of criticism of Morrisons, some of which I think is ill-founded.

There are two sides to every story and while there are savings to be made at the smaller two, I do believe that this is sometimes achieved by lack of personal service, waiting in long queues and unavailable products and often pricing mistakes particularly on new offers.

The smaller of the two German supermarkets has a branch in our town which I visit on a weekly basis.

Being a typical Yorkshireman, I usually tolerate the downside in return for the savings made.

However last week’s experience was the final nail in the coffin.

My wife and I shopped there on Thursday which is the day they start their offers and spent over £60. We bought two packs of bacon medallions which were on offer and reduced by 50p each.

Past experience usually means we check the receipt before leaving the store, but on this occasion we failed to do this and when we got home and did so we saw that instead of a saving we had in fact paid 90p per pack more.

We also noticed there was a different weight on the back of the product packaging and a wrong description of the item meaning that the wrong labels had been used on the production line.

My wife visited the store the next day showed a member of the management team the receipts and asked for a refund for the overcharged item.

He was unapologetic and said she would have to return home and bring the goods as well as the receipts meant nothing to him.

He inferred she was trying to pull a fast one. Had this on past experience been at Morrisons, we would have had our money back straight away.

In Asda, we would have also received the goods for free or a gift card for our inconvenience.

From: Mrs M Whitaker, Harswell, East Yorkshire.

my Morrisons and Asda local shops are wonderful, with helpful staff with pleasant personalities. Tesco and Sainsbury’s are uncaring, unpleasant and sometimes rude, so I never go in to these at all now.