Sunday, November 15, 2009

Buying all the pastries

Buying all the pastries
Snapped this chap calling out to his pastry accomplice, waiting for the last of the batch to be brought to the till for purchase and eventual consumption.

Tesco, Kingsland Road, London

Saturday, January 31, 2009

Up close

Up close
I was paying way too much attention to my efforts in avoiding over-exposure to be able to see what this chap was queueing to buy, and so failed in both regards. I prostrate myself in apology.

Tesco, Shoreditch High Street, London EC2

Wednesday, January 17, 2007

Buy what we say, not what you want

Buy what we say, not what you want
Tesco put this shop into the retail space on the ground floor of a new apartment building near to the one in which I live. After overcoming my initial uncertainty as to whether to shop there due to their monopolistic methods and boilerplate approach simply on the presumably universal grounds that it's convenient and comparatively cheap, even if the food is frankly crap and the choice limited, I dared to ask the store manager if they would be able to get a different, additional flavour of the already obviously extremely well-selling Innocent fruit drinks in, because I like them a lot and would buy the new ones regularly.

No, he said, grimacing slightly, they wouldn't; the stock was all arranged at head office "on the computer", and the computer knew best. I implied in response that it seemed unlikely that, no matter how advanced its algorithms, said computer would know best as to whether one or possibly more real humans living in the streets surrounding a given branch were sufficiently partial to orange, carrot and mango Innocent "superfoods" smoothies that they might therefore not be giving Tesco even more money than the company was already creaming in, and he said that that was as may be, but that head office, as universal arbiter of taste and quality, decided and would continue to decide.

Finally I suggested that perhaps he might be kind enough to tell head office that a customer had asked for this particular flavour, and he informed me, his grimace converted to a smirk, that he wouldn't, because it was for me to send them an email - "on the Internet" - should I so desire.