Dear Waitrose...

[ffutures]

...when you closed your Marylebone store for several weeks I was annoyed, because it meant using Tesco, who have a single-queue system which at busy times snakes around most of the store and leaves the aisles congested. But I consoled myself with the thought that you would be reopening a new and improved store.

So you re-opened the store with narrower maze-like aisles and a single queue system that at busy times snakes around most of the store and leaves the aisles congested. Congested enough that I actually feel claustrophobic, which never happened with Tescos - this may be because you've set things up so that in large chunks of the shop you can't see the outside world. As a result I've only been in twice since you reopened - formerly I shopped there nearly every day.

It's become obvious that the purpose of this is so that customers will have to move around a larger proportion of the store trying to find the end of the queue, and possibly impulse buy en route. It's obvious because you are now routing the queue through the wine and spirits department, which sells the most expensive goods.

What any teetotal / alcoholic customers make of this might be interesting - I suspect that this may actually be an offence under the licensing act, though I don't have the patience to look it up. It strikes me as being about as sensitive as your tactic of giving away hundreds of pork pies (with no vegetarian etc. alternative) in the street in the week or so before the store reopened, in an area that gets a lot of Moslem and Jewish visitors.

Luckily you've made an application to Westminster City Council to change your store's wine and spirits department under the licensing act. I don't have the patience to look up the precise law, but when I send in my planning objection tonight I hope that they will have the facts at their fingertips.

Have a nice day.

Comments

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

Familiar pattern. Two businesses; one does something the wrong way, and I compare it unfavorably to another that does it the right way. Then the right one changes to match the wrong one. Now everybody's wretched. Hooray!

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Yep.

The interesting thing was that a month or so before they began changing the store they had a load of video cameras studying the movement of the customers - presumably to work out how to optimise things to maximise the time and area of the store that customers were forced to spend there.

[heliograph.livejournal.com]

They might have the expensive booze right by the checkout to discourage shoplifting. When I worked at a Kwiki-Mart-type place, we kept all the expensive booze behind the counter.

Can't you just order everything you want online and have it delivered to your home, like we do here in America, the Greatest Country On Earth? Waiting in line is SOOOO 20th century!

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

It's near the checkouts, not next to it. Basically like a shop within a shop, except that you still pay at the main checkouts. In their old layout it was just a few rows of shelves to one side of the store and out of the way, and I suspect did less business than they liked. They've moved it forward to raise its profile, and I suspect that the queue thing is another move to make people more aware of it.

A lot of the shopping I do at Waitrose is stuff for work - things we needed in a hurry, for lessons etc., so home delivery isn't practical. But I do a lot for myelf too since I'm going in anyway and their stuff is usually good. Right now the school isnt buying much because it's almost the end of term, I would probably be going in anyway, but with things so unpleasant I've been waiting until the evening and shopping at one or another supermarket near home. I just hope that by September they'll have got their act together to some extent.

[murphys-lawyer.livejournal.com]

Ordering online is great for pre-packaged goods. Tins of baked beans, cat litter, that sort of thing. But nobody paid minimum wage to fill orders is going to spend five minutes deciding on which leg of lamb to put in the trolley. Some things you just have to shop for yourself.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Exactly.

[soren-nyrond.livejournal.com]

Indeed, a close friend of ours, who thought of the convenience factor, told us she found that she was obliged to send back up to 20% of her orders because what was delivered bore no real resemblance to what was ordered.

"Organic garden peas ?? Here: have tinned beetroot instead."

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

It's sad that the British have so taken to aping American Business Efficiency (defined as "best for the Corporation, not the Customer"). Fortunately, none of the markets in my area have adopted the single queue system and the worst they seem to do is spot the things that need refrigeration (an important consideration much of the year, here in Southern California) around in a maximum-dispersal pattern so one needs to make a whole second go-through for them (presumably with the intent of encouraging impulse purchases), and at least the ice-cream is close to the checkstands.

[zappomatic.livejournal.com]

Knowing someone who is part of the management at Waitrose in Marylebone,I can tell you that the wine department does not want the queue going through it, partly because of the increased risk of breakages, and also because it actually results in decreased wine sales (harder to choose your wine when you have to fight through a queue to reach it).

I agree that the shop is now a bit too crammed in and confusing - they've squeezed 2000 extra lines into the same floorspace. Now that the shop's bedding in, the queue only snakes around the shop at about 1pm on weekdays, at all other times the waiting time is minimal or non-existant.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Your crammed and confusing is unfortunately my claustrophobic - I went there today looking for something for work (which as it happened they didn't have) and although the place was a lot less crowded at the earlier time I visited, I felt sufficiently uncomfortable that I didn't want to stay in the store and shop around for stuff for myself.