They still can't bake! They boast an instore bakery, but I don't, for one minute, believe a proper Baker would produce the product below and try to sell it on to an unwitting consumer at full price. I bought a pack of two Pain au Raisons, brewed a fresh cup of coffee and bit into one. It was dry and didn't taste right. Turning it over explained why, as you can see from the picture below on the right. The blackened, charred bottom is clearly visible. I paid full price for this, or actually, I should say I was overcharged for this, and thereby, unwittingly, contributed to Tesco's £3bn profit as I didn't return to Tesco to complain and ask for a refund.

Link to image:

While going through the monthly exercise of shredding all the junk mail the banks, credit card and insurance companies pile through our letter boxes I find a letter from Tesco Insurance saying they have automatically renewed my home insurance. I need do no more!

The letter says:

My first thought was "I've been had", my second was, why did Tesco store my bank details for the year? My third thought was, look at the premium - £456.75. This is over two and a half times more expensive than the cheapest quote I had received for a comparable policy, from Swinton.

My fourth thought was, I'll never use these cowboys again, how can they get away with it - and try to pass it off as though they're doing me a favour and being done in the name of high standards?

What'll it be next? Will I find some of the staff in my living room opening a bottle of wine. "We decided to help ourselves, every little helps!"

In a seafood salad purchased from Tesco I found the diminutive monster circled below clung to the side of a prawn, perhaps feeding. Like I'm going to eat it now! How annoying!

Under the microscope I thought the creature bore a a slight resemblance to Tesco CEO, Sir Terry Leahy, but it may have been a trick of the light. Gosh, I hope he's not doing anything despicable on the food.

I'm sure I have a weak regulator to thank for shafting the consumer and limiting my choice in the area so I have to endure three trips to Tesco in the week, one to the supermarket, one to the Tesco convenience shop and one to the Tesco petrol station.

All three had their own dissatisfied tale to tell about Tesco Customer Service.....

1. At the supermarket the groceries were being scanned as if it were the new speed event in the 2012 Olympics. As I struggled, near defeat, with separating plastic bags and trying to pack, the cashier was finished and was now busy texting on her mobile phone, completely oblivious to me.

2. At the partly flooded convenience shop I bought a chicken ceaser wrap. The cashier seemed to clear a bonus of £2 from the transaction. I handed him £4, and watched as he registered £2 cash received on the till. What happened to the other £2?

3. At the petrol station - I wrote about this earlier - a queue even though there are free pumps. What are the staff doing? From the corner of my eye I observe a manager emerge from the nearby supermarket. He takes a closer look, albeit at long distance, at the queue and scuttles back inside the supermarket. What do the staff do? Nothing!

I think the petrol stations are designed to work without supervision. When I finally make it inside to pay the two chuckling cashiers decide to swap tills while us customers wait.

Going to Tesco gets you in such a bad mood! Grrrrrrr......

I probably wouldn't mind queueing for petrol if there was a shortage, but to end up in a queue for no reason at all is absolutely infuriating. There are free pumps, but we're sitting in a queue. All because there are a group of boneheads who insist on waiting for the pump to be on the same side as their petrol cap.

It makes no bloody difference! The pump will reach. You can use any pump.

To demonstrate the point, below is a picture of me filling my car up with the petrol cap "on the wrong side". Quite clearly there is loads of room.

Tesco have added a wall of diy tools to its Express in Port Solent as it continues to expand and expand and expand. I went in to do some quick grocery shopping, but what an effort! Firstly, there were no baskets by the door and I had to literally hunt one down. None at checkout one. None at checkout two. None at checkout three. What the f_ck, did they send them all out on a training course! Finally, I find one lone basket at checkout nine.

You know I read recently that well over 50% of the people who shop at Tesco find it irritating. I'm sure the rest find it really annoying. Half the aisles are littered with packaging and there just seems to be no pride in keeping the place clean.

No pride. What's this? Pizza Express pizzas dated the 13th. That's three days ago, and they are still on sale at full price. Now that's just taking the piss!

32 dead horses were discovered in Amersham, Bucks at the weekend. Three other animals were in such poor condition they had to be put down, while the remaining stock of eighty were being taken to sanctuaries rather than the meat hooks they were destined for. Conditions at the site were described as "utterly horrific" with horses being tied up in small pens and standing in their own excrement.

So what's the problem? They're animals! There are plenty of starving people in Africa who'd be happy to eat them! This probably isn't a response you'd expect, but would it be more acceptable if I was talking about chickens?

They live for thirty nine days, never see natural light, constantly feed to make their commercial weight, are overcrowded, get painful lesions on their legs from sitting in their own faeces ("hock burns"), and are starved for eight hours on their last day to have a clean gut before ending up on our shelves in Tesco at two for a fiver.

This is the story Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall has been describing on Channel 4 this week as he tried to convert  Axminster into Britain's first free range town. His experimental chicken farm contrasted differences in welfare, and in taste, between factory reared and free range. The free range chickens, he said, are "out here in the grass, doing what chickens want to do."

I would like to think, and I'm probably in the majority,  the surviving horses in Amersham would have a similar fate and were free to run around a field, but when it comes to chickens people just don't seem to feel the same. They're chickens, they'll buy two for a fiver.

I'm actually in denial it's the new year.  It can't really have passed by that quickly. They've missed out on some of the months. They must have done. Was there an April? And what about October, I don't remember there being an October?

I do remember The Rise of the Silver Surfer, the disappearance of Madeline, demolishing the garden shed, and a few other things really got my goat during the year, but here's my top ten....

1. Gordon Brown
   Continuing to annoy me. He became Prime Minister, bottled an election, quietly signed the Lisbon treaty passing further powers away to the EU, promised a government of "all the talents" then lost the personal details of 25million people, had a party funding scandal, pledged an end to spin while in the same breath claiming to have reduced the rate of corporation tax (not quite, there was an increase for small companies - the so called backbone of the economy). The Tories say he's the wrong man, but of course they would, wouldn't they! 
2. Carbon footprint
   In 2007 our carbon footprints became big business. The Chancellor has been rubbing his hands in glee at the prospect of being able to introduce new types of taxes, and companies have been dressing in floral prints designed by their marketers. This latest fashion of "social responsibility" is being paraded on the catwalk in front of us mug consumers. Meanwhile there seems to be a whole body of evidence accumulating to suggest man-made C02 plays only a minor, insignificant role in climate change. When trying to finds the facts on Google I found instead near Freudian hysteria and contributions from people who seem to think they're in a movie. The consequences of man-made climate change, wrote one budding actor, will be "worse, much much worse......eventual extinction".
3. Nobel Peace Prize
   In keeping with "the year of the footprint" this year the Nobel Prize for Peace was shared between an organisation and Al Gore. They each get half a prize " for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change".  Why did Al Gore get a prize for his video? There's even doubts it was actually true, like, get down to the bookies - there may yet be a chance of Jeremy Clarkson winning in 2008 for his continued work on Top Gear.
4. Virgin Media
   Launched on February 14th, V-Day. Steve Burch, CEO of NTL, was quoted at the time as saying "Virgin Media will shake up the market by bringing the Virgin traditions of value-for-money, brilliant customer service and innovation to the world of entertainment and communications."  However, a bungled negotiation with BSkyB led to the loss of popular channels such as Sky 1, Sky News, Sky 2, Sky Travel, Sky 3.... 40,000 customers fled in the first three months, perhaps they knew the virgin traditions of "value for money, brilliant customer service and innovation" are a branding screen thrown up to hide a normal company. They don't mean anything. Did we see our TV charges reduce with less channels? No. Did we see phone charges increase? Yes Sir we did!
5. Windows Vista
   The biggest technological disappointment of 2007 despite an R&D bill of £10bn, Windows Vista, actually seems to be an operating system designed for teenagers to help organise their media files. It seems a ridiculous use of hardware to spend on unnecessarily indexing every file and on fancy graphics like transparency which don't add anything and, in fact,  hamper the experience.  First set of tasks to do if you're a consumer stuck with Vista and you can't return it - turn off windows sidebar, un-tick all files in Indexing options, change update settings, change control panel to classic view, change start menu to classic, and yes, download open office as you won't be able to use Excel. 
6. HMRC
   It doesn't look like we'll ever see a video podcast or a YouTube channel explaining the ongoing delays to VAT applications which continued throughout 2007. The HMRC website, now in 2008, still displays the same notice since 2006, "Please be aware we are currently experiencing processing delays with both paper and online applications".  Applications can take up to six months to process, clearly inconveniencing small business. No practical guidance is given by HMRC on what to do during this lengthy application period. They just don't care, they're opening premise - "everyone's a crook" - guides all policy.
7. Tesco
   What's Tesco becoming? On my last visit of 2007 to Tesco Express in Port Solent my conclusion was a village. It has it's own pharmacy, a Costa Coffee, a supermarket, what appears to be an Argos, a department store, a Krispy Kreme Doughnut, and an opticians. The trouble is the supermarket is a mess, boxes on the ground, empty shelves, off products and staff pushing cages everywhere. You have to literally dodge the cages because they can't see what's in front when they're pushing. And there are plans to add a dentist practice to this village. I'd actually prefer if they brought in another supermarket chain, a company that knows how to run a supermarket, because Tesco seem to have forgotten.
8. Celebrity Rehab
   Britney Spears, Amy Winehouse, Pete Doherty, Lyndsay Lohan et al, all seemingly gone off the rails. They go into rehab, they come out, they get drunk or spaced, get pictured without their underwear, get spaced, go into rehab, and it's all front page news. I'm just not intersted. Why can't they just get a grip?
9. Open Season on the Games
   The 2012 logo was launched on Monday the 4th of  June and was almost instantly and unanimously derided (including by me). The jagged, graffiti design was likened to Lisa Simpson performing a lewd sex act. Within three days almost 50,000 people signed an online petition calling for the logo to be scrapped, an animated version had to be pulled from broadcast over fears the effects cause epileptic seizure. It was open season on "the Games", all year in fact, the underlying theme being, it's being run by a bunch of incompetents who don't know what they're doing. It'll be wrong and over budget. Guffaw! How could they forget the VAT? See point six above on HMRC, who in the end decided they couldn't register.
10. Big Brother
    Following the celebrity Big Brother race row, the ugly bullying of Shilpa Shetty, and Carphone Warehouse withdrawing sponsorship for the programme, we quietly hoped 2007 would be the last year of Big Brother. But no, it's continued....

Happy New Year and God bless for 2008

Krispy Kreme have a facebook group, apparently, called Krispy Kreme is coming to Portsmouth. But don't get me started on social networking sites, I want to talk about another one. This site, pictured below, used to be the children's playground at Tesco's North Harbour in Portsmouth.

Make way! It was obviously not producing revenue and has been given over to the much healthier doughnut! Evidently 120,000 of them will be given out free in the run up to store opening and , especially for Portsmouth, a limited edition doughnut, called the Berry Redknapp, after former Pompey manager, will also be available. Don't you just love the marketing?

And the playground? Gone.

Well, its happened, not only do the American's have to deal with having George W Bush as "Commander and Chief" they now have to confront Sir Terry Leahy as "Commander in Shite". Tesco have trumpted the beginning of its US campaign with the opening of Fresh & Easy in Florida Avenue in Hemet, Califorina, poor ba#t#rds.

Apparently, "Tel boy" is'nt happy with gleaning £16.7bn from its UK operations and $11bn from its international operation's its now set to spend $250m in opening 250 stores accoss the US, $1m a store, quality is apparently rife in this strategy. Additionally Leahy would pursue "everyday low price, strategy", keeping prices low on the basics such as milk ans sugar as low as possible rather than using promotional price cuts, coupons or the loyalty cards,why the different strategy in the US?.

No doubt in time Fresh & Easy will morph into the Tesco that we know and grossly dislike on this side of the Atlantic, Vannilla Cornet,will be become the norm and once the Tesco self check-out becomes the norm , I feel that we will have much more in common with our American brothers, I am sure that they will say what the feck did we send so many of our sons to Europe in the in 1940's in order to suffer this shite. Every little helps my arse.

Householders were reminded during the week of their prodigal attitude to wasting food. The blame for dumping 3.3million tonnes of edible food into landfill sites is tipped squarely onto us as the consumers. In landfill the food breaks down and causes "greenhouse gases" which, we're reminded, contribute to the type of weather which has left large swathes of the UK under water.

Earlier in the year, Jennie Price, a former Chief Executive of Wrap, the UK's waste body, advised us to look in the fridge or cupboard before shopping, and as far back as 2005 Lord Haskins accused us of having "eyes...bigger than stomachs".

Meanwhile the supermarkets are in the clear. You can still buy food off the shelf which is already rotting. You can still buy food where the use by date is the day you're actually buying it (and you're still paying full price). 

Every adult in the UK, according to Wrap, wastes approximately £400 a year on food that ends up in the bin. Where else is it supposed to go if you can't eat it?

I read recently in The Long Tail that the supermarket contributed to the downfall of communism. The supermarket "showcased how a free market economy could deliver abundant, affordable food and became a metaphor for what capitalism could do and Communism could not". Boris Yeltsin, the first president of the Russian Federation recalled in his autobiography, recounting a visit to a supermarket in 1989, "When I saw those shelves crammed with hundreds, thousands of cans, cartons, and goods of every possible sort, for the first time I felt quite frankly sick with despair for the Soviet people."

Luckily it wasn't Tesco he visited. The empty shelves, damaged produce and long checkout queues might have given him an entirely different vision of the economy.

Photo: Vision of the future or simply a queue arising from a lack of checkout staff or is it confused souls waiting for food to be moved from cages to the shelves.....

Detergent Bottles is a very general term for what these really are. They are not all detergents in the way we consider detergent (i.e washing powder). These are the PET Botttles with Trigger Spray guns on them for cleaning the counter top, cleaning the shower, spray on a stain on a shirt, oven cleaners, disinfectant, etc. You all know the type.

Now if like me (and before someone suggests it I am NOT a Green Nut), I am concerned for our environment and alos the future of my childrena nd grandchildren and their children and so on.

Whne the wife an I go shopping to one of the above named stores we invaribly return with at least 1 of these bottles if not 2. and both with spray triggers. What have the empty ones got More f**king triggers!. What do I put in my recycle bin ?. I rinse out teh bottle and put it in, the trigger I'm afraid goes in the land fill waste bin because it is not acceptable recycleable rubbish.

Why of Why cant the manufacturers offer 'Refills'- An Eco Friendly Solution for thier product. We can reuse our existing trigger, and when the spring is eventually worn out we can buy a new bottle with a trigger on it. Think what else, we could save ourselves a few cent on expenditure - probably not a lot. I would prefer to pay the current price and have the savings passed on into researching more biodegradeable containers for the detergents.

Tesco are off again to capture more of your money, and they are'nt going to do this by providing fresh produce on their shelves, or employing helpful staff, no they are going to sell you mobile phone minutes along with your bread,milk,credit card,loans,cheap apartments and life assurance. They have just entered into an agreement with O2 to buy minutes on a wholesale basis and sell them onto you while you complete your weekly shop.

I suppose on the plus side this will open more competiton in the telecommunication sector, which hopefully will lead to the lowering of costs to the consumer, but as with all silver linings there needs to be a cloud. By indulging in this new initiative I can't help but think that resources will be diverted from the core business of providing us with food and a clean environment in which to do your weekly shop. I have a feeling that Marks Vanilla Cornet experience will become more frequent in the future.

As I move on through life would'nt it be nice to have the following,

• Supermarkets that sell you good fresh food as a fair price.
• Electricity companies that sell only electricity.
• Gas companies that sell only Gas.
• Airlines that actually fly you some where and treat you with respect.

I know I sound like a "grumpy old man " thats because these companies are over-complicating my life, and its my money that they want, and all I want in return is value and quality.

I wonder if this service will be free from bugs unlike Tescos petrol? I suppose we'll have to wait and see.

I suppose to amend Tesco's catch phrase "Every little piece of shite that we can sell, helps our bottom line, and increases our chances of world domination"

Tesco are set to issue hard hats and high visibility jackets to shoppers who visit their stores after 9pm. At this time the stores are effectively transformed into workplaces rather than customer friendly supermarkets. 

The stores remain open to grab late night shoppers even though the aisles are cluttered with cages and access is blocked to the majority of the shelves. Shoppers have been seen to get footholds in the cages to reach items like bottled water which are now beyond access.

The cages are being rolled out of stockrooms, pushed from behind by one person with limited visibility of shoppers who might be dithering or just plain confused in the aisles. However, stores profitability is up as the stores can lock up earlier thereby reducing overheads like staff costs.

..... Okay so I made the headline up, partly, everything is true other than the hard hats and high visibility jackets, but I am beginning to think I should bring my own. This trend seems to be another example of Tesco putting margin first, customer second.

Returning late from work I stopped into Tesco and couldn't resist buying a vanilla creme coronet from the bakery to cheer myself up. I had to take a picture of it because I can't yet find the words to describe the trauma of finding a center filled with green mould (see picture below). The best before date was today. Is there any scientist out there who can explain how you can get green mould inside a pastry "fresh from the baker" at Tesco?

Tesco, the WalMart of grocery shopping in the UK and Ireland, has announced that its going to build homes for its staff to combat the dearth of affordable houses in many of the major cities, in which it operates. In Britian its to build 250 flats alongside its Streatham store in London, which it will allocate 100 will be in the "affordable category" and 13 will be allocated to staff. Tesco has also lodged a planning application to Dublin City Council to build a similar scheme in Sandymount, Dublin 4. Its unclear at the moment if any of these units will be allocated to staff.

All this looks very nice from the outside, especially if you are one of those who finds getting onto the property ladder almost impossible. But really what would such a move mean?. Yes, on the plus side people will have a place which they could call home, but would living over your place of work be a healthy style of working?. I have a image of a young couple both working in Tesco's being lucky to be allocated one of these flats, working, buying,and borrowing, from Tesco. I suppose they could be named the "Tescoites" and live in a similar way those who lived in Stalins "gualag's". Consider what kind of "work life balance" would be afforded to the "Tescoites", there you are lying in bed at 3am and a message comes over the "Tesco" intercom, "we are low on bread, get up a fill the shelves", this would be really annoying if at 3am you were indulging in other activites in bed.

What happens if you leave your employment, do you also leave your flat?. Will there be some clause in your purchase contract that due to the fact that the flat was sold to you below market price,if you will leave you must sell it back to Tesco at a price below the "market value"?.

I suppose the days of Grocers selling groceries are lost for-ever but the march into "Property Development" just seems a step to far.It would be far better for Tesco to ensure that the shelves in its stores are full when one goes and does their shopping.

Perhaps George Orwell was'nt to far from the mark after all.....

We're not always functioning at our full 40%. Sometimes we go into auto pilot and, for all intents and purposes, are pretty much switched off. Some things are so familiar to us we don't think about them. Our expectations are so strong about the outcome we don't expect anything different to happen. You go into Tescos, you fill your trolley, you come home and put things away. Only then do you discover the rotten apple in the bag or that the best before end date is only a few hours away. To compound your mood, your annoyance is directed at yourself for not paying attention rather than the vendor, who has taken money from you for something you can't eat..

Bad Apple in Bag

Bad Apple Portrait

The Good Ones

For legal reasons I should add. I did buy a bag of apples today from Tesco. The bag contained one bad apple, the rest were intact. The evidence is pictured above. I didn't buy anything with an expiry date about to occur.

You have one of those days. It's the middle of the week. You're late leaving the office. You're not in a good mood.You've already decided you just have to stop and get a bottle of wine. As you know there's nothing in the fridge, you bundle everything into one stop. Your shopping basket fills with one bottle of Anubis, a 3 pack of Magnums, 2 pain aux raisons, and for dinner?

There you are in the ready made meal aisle. A picture catches your eye: mmmmmm...... Finest Chilli Beef Noodles. The short, mouth watering trip from Tesco's to home is spent thinking about the chilli beef, mmmmmmm, pouring a glass of wine with "beaded bubbles winking at the brim" like they do in "Ode to a Nightingale".

You're there. You switch the oven on, gas mark 5 you presume ....mmmmmmmmmm. You look at the packaging. You look again. You turn the box of Chilli Noodles around, and over again, not believing the innocuous, camouflaged symbol in the bottom left hand corner which says "microwave only". You don't have one. Having grown up in Ireland in the 70's and 80's you've always retained your suspicion of the microwave, and you've just paid £3.69 to be snatched, unceremoniously, from the jaws of your midweek, having a very bad day, escape.