The Tesco & other non-Morrisons supermarket thread

[Pete]

Shelf Ready Packaging is a mixed bag. Obviously is is FAR easier to put out and thus quicker, however some brands do better than others. The ideal format is the type with either well perforated tear marks or the type where there is a tray and a separate lid and you just cut the four strips of tape and lift off the lid.

Course many either fail to make the perforations properly and thus end up with shoddy tears or others are just not done properly and have to be cut manually.

What a lot of shops fail to realist however is whilst this may reduce putting the time it takes to put x number of boxes *onto* the shelf from say 6 mins to 2, you then must allocate 10 seconds or so for a member of staff to float by with a trolley throwing the empty cardboard into a trolley ever so often during the day to make the shop tidier, hence the jumble of empty boxes that often occurs.

[bilky asko]

I just scan everything through, and then pack it all once I've paid.

That's fine if there's no queue, but people who insist on doing ALL their bagging at the end of a shop when there's a queue rather annoy me, especially when they take their sweet time doing it. Not accusing you of this personally, just ranting!

I never have more than a couple of bags full, so it adds about ten seconds at the end - which I've already saved not packing while I'm going

I've noticed recently that now the machines need you to press pay twice to register. It's annoying when you've counted all your change and you have to prod it again.

Just put your money in. With the possible exception of Boots, you can just start dumping money in and it will take you straight to the pay with cash page.

I hadn't thought of that.

What type of Scottish banknote was it? They're notoriously fussy about Clydesdale ones but BOS and RBS ones work. Odd that the English tills would have different firmware to the Scottish ones.

One was Clydesdale and the other was RBS. The Irish one was Ulster Bank.

I did think the problem with the Scottish notes were that they were quite tatty in comparison to the Irish one - then again, I've put in a fiver that was practically in two and it accepted it straight away. It's a shame the same can't be said about other things with note acceptors that only accept the most crease free notes.

[WillPS]

Taking this wildly back on-topic if I may:



I present two branches of Iceland *literally* side-by-side, selling more or less exactly the same lines.

[Sput]

Is it some cross-over while one replaces the other?

[Pete]

The Tesco tills are pretty generous when it comes to accepting notes and coins. They certainly accept worse condition copper than the coinstar machines do.

[Gavin Scott]

The Tesco tills are pretty generous when it comes to accepting notes and coins. They certainly accept worse condition copper than the coinstar machines do.

That's because, unlike Coinstar, they're going to give the coins back out to another customer - so they probably don't care.

[Pete]

The Tesco tills are pretty generous when it comes to accepting notes and coins. They certainly accept worse condition copper than the coinstar machines do.

That's because, unlike Coinstar, they're going to give the coins back out to another customer - so they probably don't care.

Good point.

(how much fun is Coinstar btw? Never get tired of it )

[Gavin Scott]

I love going there with a gigantic bag of coins. Little kids look on in awe - presumably wanting to have a go tipping the money tray in.

But they can FECK OFF. I'm paying 7.9% to use the damned thing, so the fun is MINE.

[Alexia]

Taking this wildly back on-topic if I may:

I present two branches of Iceland *literally* side-by-side, selling more or less exactly the same lines.

Yep, that's how we do it in Newport. We also have two Lloyds TSBs right next to each other, and three (count them) three branches of Greggs on the high street.

Slight back story to this: the one on the right of shot used to actually be the Food Hall for a branch of Littlewoods. The photographer is here-ish and Littlewoods used to be where the new Halifax and Co-Op banks are to your right on GSV. When Littlewoods pulled out, Iceland stepped in. There is a further Iceland a mere 800m or so away across Newport Bridge on Clarence Place.

This Iceland has been the subject of an ongoing legal dispute between themselves and Newport City Council, who, hoping to redevelop John Frost Square into something called "Friar's Walk", compulsary purchased all the shopping area surrounding the square. Iceland protested this, and it's only recently that NCC have won the right to knock it all down.

More info here :
http://www.newportcitycentre.co.uk/icelandbattle.aspx


and probably a whole shitload more if you type "Iceland" into the South Wales Argus search box, but I wouldn't worry too much - it's not that interesting.

[woah]

We have a similar thing here in Sheffield. We had a branch of Abbey, a branch of Bradford and Bingley, and a branch of Alliance and Leicester. All of them are now Santander, but two branches are literally opposite each other across the tramlines on the high street, and the other is just a little further up, about a minute's walk away. Crazy!

[cdd]

I love going there with a gigantic bag of coins. Little kids look on in awe - presumably wanting to have a go tipping the money tray in.

But they can FECK OFF. I'm paying 7.9% to use the damned thing, so the fun is MINE.

How come anyone uses coinstar these days when the self checkout tills now have effortless change feeders?

(Admittedly there was an awkward scene a while back where I broke a self checkout machine and started spewing out change and error messages after emptying a huge jar of coins in, but as long as you do it in non-monolithic batches it's fine...)

These days I just store change up in my car and empty out wahtever I have collected over a couple of weeks into a self checkout machine. No 7.9% commission and I get to hold on to my pennies