- most importantly , please reintroduce dates on fresh produce packaging, or at least include the date that the item went on display. You claim this is all about reducing food waste, but all that happens is that food waste is passed onto the customer when a fresh food item that they’ve paid full price for is mouldy/turning bad the day after they’ve bought it.
Yes, as PP said, they still have dates on them, but they think they've channelled Bletchley Park and been far too cunning for us ever to crack their code. Letters for the months - A = Jan, B = Feb, C = Mar; or sometimes just two letters for the month - JE = June, JY = July; and then numbers for the actual days. We know that you're deliberately trying to trick us into buying the older stock first, and that it is wholly for YOUR benefit and most certainly not for ours or for the planet's.
ASDA:
Keep better stock control in your whole store. Short-dated is one thing, but I really don't want to have to regularly check to avoid being caught out by the use-by yesterday/2 days ago - especially for things like meat.
Don't wrap bananas in plastic - it makes you look like colossal hypocrites when you lecture us about our single plastic use. I get that some products do need plastic for hygiene or freshness; but bananas are already wrapped by nature. Please don't tell me that you never realised this, and that, all these years when you've partaken of lovely bendy yellow fruit yourselves, you've been chucking the whole thing in, peel and all, like a monkey?!
Fix your self-service tills so that it doesn't very much appear like they've been blatantly programmed to rip off and defraud your customers. If the robot really does need an assistant to come over and comfort it when it decides to ghost a random item and refuse to identify it, that's annoying enough; but when it scans your item, successfully identifies it and then adds the cost (next to the correct description) to your running total as you put it on to the scales - and then claims that it doesn't recognise it and tells you to scan it again - this is going to catch a lot of people out, especially more vulnerable people, who will then end up paying twice for one item without realising it. Of course you know this and have deliberately decided not to rectify it, to protect your honesty and integrity with your loyal customers. Trading Standards are primarily meant for the likes of Dodgy Dave's Second-Hand Car Yard and not huge national chains like you, but in this respect, you are potentially just as bad as Dave is.
ANY SUPERMARKETS:
Please bring back Empire apples. They are so crunchy and delicious and leave all other kinds of apple running off in a pique of inferior jealousy and crying with shame at what they realise they can never hope to be. Why have they disappeared?!