THURSDAY 14 DECEMBER – SURPRISE PRIZE

Things are looking up! Today there was a big swanky Bentley in the car park. Perhaps it was King John on a royal visit or maybe someone’s chauffeur noticed both the ingress and egress barriers were out of action? When my year is finished I will have to calculate the % of times that I would have parked for free because the barrier was not working had I not had the ‘spend more than £15 at Sainsbury’s and park for free’ pass. If you see what I mean……. Well, what goes round comes round. The TalkTalk representative was there again and asked me the same question as before – ‘Do you mind if I ask you a question?’ but, this time, before I could reply coolly ‘No, but I won’t reply’ she asked me two questions. I guess there might have been a remote possibility that I was interested in TalkTalk but not when she asked ‘Do you collect Nectar points’ as her opening gambit! This was followed quickly by ‘Do you have a BT landline?’. I mumbled ‘No’ to both questions and hurried on. The prospect of being bogged down with Nectar points from someone other than Sainsbury’s fills me with horror – one bee (nectar provider) is enough! Now, salmon. I know there is a big hoohah about farmed salmon, something about it being dangerous and it does look spectacularly pink, but I buy it nonetheless. I nearly got caught out, though, this week as lurking within the salmon display was salmon farmed in … Norway. And, needless to say, it’s cheaper than Scottish farmed salmon, so if you buy the cheapest without reading the labels you end up with salmon from Norway. Norwegian farmed salmon is probably only a small step away from surimi, you remember - the somewhat questionable mushy stuff that I bought a few weeks ago in the interests of research, which ended up in my brown friend outside the back door. Anyway, celebrations are in order today – Sainsbury’s have won another award! This time they’ve won the Wine Supermarket of the Year (despite not selling wine from their own country – good job I wasn’t a judge). I have to say this comes as a real surprise. OK, they have lots of the stuff but are they really any better than any other supermarket? The Sainsbury’s website says that their recent focus has been to ‘improve the shopability of the wine aisle’. Whatever does that mean? In my local store it’s the same width and length as it always has been with bottles on shelves and some special offer stickers (which this week referred to wines that weren’t there – shopinability presumably). Maybe I will check if ‘shopability’ is in the dictionary – I suspect it’s some marketing speak which is completely over the head of mere mortals like me! Also the website says that 85 new wines have been introduced. How can that possibly be? The shelves are the same length and height so it can only mean one thing … some lines have been dropped. Aha! Perhaps that’s what happened to their English wine. The judges were ‘particularly impressed by high level of training Sainsbury’s gives its collegues (sic – you will be!) in the wine department and … the information offered to customers’. Well, whilst training is very laudable what benefit do I, the customer, get from this? The only evidence I’ve seen is the stocker upper (he who stocks up) is very helpful and seems to know his grapes from his onions but I bet he hasn’t had any of this ‘high level of training’. And what ‘information?’. This implies there are helpful little write ups on each wine saying things like ‘excellent with cold meats and cheese’ or ‘complements surimi’ (note I have spelt ‘complements’ correctly, although perhaps it should be ‘spelled’?) but there aren’t! So it seems that what the judges ‘found’ is not borne out by the reality at the local store level. Anyway, on to the checkout. Today my cashier started talking to himself! I asked if he was OK, to which he replied that he was not staying on after 2pm which is when his shift ended as he wouldn’t be paid any extra and blah blah blah. I sympathised with him but strangely he has little pride in working for a company that has been voted Supermarket of the Year and Wine Supermarket of the Year. And, of course, on reflection, I don’t think King John could have been visiting today in his swanky Bentley as if he had my cashiering friend would have been falling over himself to stay on late. But then again perhaps not!

Items bought 31

Cost £53.80

Cost per item £1.73

Checkout number 14 (three times now, so tops the table)

Nectar points balance 780