This morning Mr Courier delivered this:
Even the cat was 'excited'
(Helped to demonstrate size perspective, anyhow)
We were expecting a couple of deliveries for exchanged Christmas presents (boots for my son in a smaller size, a dress for my wife - also smaller, happily!), but why was this so light? Opening the box initially revealed nothing except seemingly a lot of giant bubble wrap:
But what lay beneath?
Wait ... all that to send this?:
It was a pack of decorations from Tesco to replace ones that had been sent incorrectly in the first place. The first lot had arrived with two similar sized products, but in the same sized box - which already had us angered at the time by the environmental wastage (Amazon are also guilty of this).
* * * * *
So, let's also look at the transaction from an economical perspective and you might get some clues as to why Tesco's profits and market share have been on the slide ...
- The item itself cost £7.99, to help you calculate the likely profit margin.
- The postage we paid on the original item was part of a £3.95 minimum (albeit sent with two other items), so this would have been incurred by Tesco themselves for the re-despatch.
- In the event, the goods that arrived were the same as the first lot. The problem was in the product description, so they've incurred the additional postage cost as a result of someone's original input error.
- Not only have their resource costs doubled as a result of having to re-process this item, but they also had to pay the person in the call centre who arranged for the second despatch and someone else will presumably have to go in and alter the product description - if they can even bother to try to prevent an expensive recurrence.
- They could clearly have saved on packaging costs (but it's the waste and impact on the planet's resources that upsets us the most).
- They told us to keep the item sent to us in error, which is possibly enough on its own to go into negative profit on this transaction.
* * * * *
Now, we could go back to them and repeat the whole fiasco over again but we can make do with the items we've been sent - and we'd rather save another tree from being sacrificed as a result of corporate incompetency.
I'm posting links to this on Twitter, Facebook and to Tesco themselves - possibly BBC Watchdog - and would urge you to take similar action the next time a delivery contains more air than substance.
But at least the cat's happy!
