"The total shopping bill had gone from £15 to £60"

Phil Barnes sent in this email to TC on December 11th:

Here’s a snippet of a complaint I sent to Tescos…

I write extremely angry and frustrated at the shoddy service provided by Tesco online. After hours of searching and selecting for products online, entering my personal and bank details I finally place my first order online, due to be delivered the next day between 9 and 11pm. I didn’t mind this effort as it would save me having to go shopping for some stocking fillers; I don't have much free time.

The order arrives and I'm informed by the driver that some of the products have been replaced with others due to stock shortages. Fair enough I said, expecting a couple of items to be replaced with alternatives. On checking the invoice 17 or the 20 (approx) items I ordered had been replaced. To make matters worse, the prices were not comparable. For example an item costing 50p had been replaced with an item costing £7.99. All in all the total shopping bill had gone from £15 to £60 (approx). I find this ludicrous that common sense didn't tell someone that this would be unacceptable to me.

At this time I am still awaiting a call about refunding me accordingly but I guess it's not a priority to you. You have completely wasted my time and I am unsure how I am going to find time to repeat the process. As you can probably expect, I will not be shopping with Tesco online again. I have fear of ordering £100 of shopping and getting £500 bill. In fact, I am that annoyed, think Sainsbury’s can now take my £1,000 per month spend.

I can't even believe I have wasted more of my time writing this. Idiots.

We'd better start walking down the motorway

Hi,

Just had a bad experience with Tesco... for the sake of 30p. This is the email we just sent them which explains it all...

Dear Sir,

My partner and I have been customers of Tesco for some years now, both instore and online, and have always felt valued and cared for as customers.

Unfortunately, that experience has come to an abrupt end!

Having placed an order online on 18.04.2008 and received a confirmation email, I was contacted by telephone this morning, Saturday 19th April 2008, to inform me that my payment was not authorised. The advisor offered to call me back within five minutes once I'd obtained my card details. She never called back.

Upon further investigation I discovered the reason for the payment not going through; although I had left £35 in my account and the order was less than £34, a £2 debit was removed from my account to verify my card details.I called customer services who transferred me to the store responsible for the delivery. The manager explained there was nothing he could do, not even remove 1 item from my shopping as there was less than £1 difference. He blamed my bank for not re-crediting the £2 in time.

This resulted in me calling my bank three times and Tesco customer services a further two times as each company blamed the other for witholding the £2 that caused my payment to fail.

As a working couple with two young children we were relying on this shopping as we can't get to the store without spending £15 on taxi fares.

This experience has left me very upset and worried as we know that we can't spend that amount of money and get the same volume of products and quality from a "convenience store " that we've always received from Tesco.

Due to this, my partner has had to come home from work earlier, sacrificing a days pay as we have no food in the property and need to get to a supermarket before we're left with no provisions for the entire weekend.

I am hoping that you will be able to give me the kind of service I've come to expect and reply to this email with any suggestions you may have regarding my situation.

I am hoping that I do not have to remove my custom in favour of another retailer.

Not holding out much hope of getting it resolved. Oh well, we'd better start walking down the motorway to the supermarket 10 miles away or our kids will starve.