Has your local Morrison's gone downhill ?

[Likeagreatcardi]

We've stopped shopping in our local one as it seems to have gone downhill . By that I mean somehow soulless , a bit grubby , often less stock , and everyone seems unhappy there.
What's yours like ?

The freezers in our local one are a disgrace! Rusty, leaking and sometimes so full of ice you can't actually get any products out! Also they don't seem to restock til around 10am so if I go in early there's nothing much available on the shelves.
There is often only one till open so long queues until maybe a manager hops on a till for maybe 10 minutes. Calls are made for staff to come to the tills but no one ever turns up!

Yes - cafe been closed for months, lift wasn’t working for weeks (store is on the second floor). Broken fixtures being held with household tape. I see a lot on social media from other supermarkets but not from them. Think they are falling behind and in trouble.

My local one is mostly good. Still busy enough, well staffed and well stocked though they seem to do the restock when I'm doing my weekly shop. It's not enormous, there's a tiny selection of kids clothes and no fresh pizza counter.
The price has gone up but when I have done my weekly shop in Asda the price hasn't been that much different

Ours isn't too bad, the bakery is crap though, the bread is either burnt, doughy or stale.

They've started selling random things, a bit like Aldi but I quite like that.

The annoying thing is that they always have charities or local businesses set up in the exit to grab you on the way out.

Also, convenience stores. My corner shop was a McColls (owned by Morrisons anyway), but a while was refurbished and re-badged as a Morrisons. Since then the general standard has gone down and down; blocked aisles, unattended tills, dairy fridges out of commission for weeks(!) at a time, etc etc.

Our store is clean, tidy, well stocked and busy, only negative is that it is so dark.

What a shame. I go in for house and garden plants, which have been great and cheap. Not very local to me. Usually I pick up a few other things too. Our nearest one is very dingy though. Narrow entrance and bad lighting. The staff are lovely - chatty and friendly.

Mixed bag for me, living in West Yorkshire we have a lot of Morrisons. It’s definitely deteriorated since it was sold but I’ve only seen locked alcohol in one store in a not great area. Fruit and veg has always been poor at Morrisons but my regular one has a great butchers counter and he will get you anything you want out of the back, a whole fillet of beef or a sirloin joint for Christmas, stuff they wouldn’t put on the shelves.

There Is a lot I still like about the supermarket such as the butchers and fishmonger, the bakery and the garden centre but they have got really expensive and are running in a shoestring.

I used to love Morrisons, especially their bakery, cream cakes and own brand items.
Ours is dark, cold, and usually a fridge has leaked. Very poorly stocked too, and they used to be better value than Tesco and Sainsburys but not any more.
For no apparent reason they’ve installed an automated gate on the way in. It never works.
Its a real shame as the staff are lovely.

Oh that is a pity. I haven't been for years as is not my local. My friend used to like it for the fish and we were overjoyed that the Ealing Broadway one sold gypsy tart!!!

Yes, Morrisons used to be reliably useful for more traditional items. Not everyone wants banoffee yogurt and salted caramel profiteroles. Their cream apple turnovers used to be amazing too.

Morrisons is my local supermarket and I still use it for my "big" shop although this has becomes more challenging due to lack of stock, empty freezers, random dark aisles, restocking taking place in daytime blocking aisles with cages and pallets and seeming to view customers as getting in the way, they have taken out most of the tills and made it self service...I do like them still for some things they stock, and the bakery at my local one is good as are the World Food aisle options. I also love the smoked Smouldering Ember Red Leicester cheese which I haven't seen elsewhere. The staff seem very stressed but are kind when you finally get their attention. It's not the cheapest but if I select carefully the cost of my shop is still ok. I do top up more than I used to at Aldi, Lidl and Home Bargains though. My local branch is also old with an inconvenient narrow entrance with poor visibility, people going in and out often run into each other.
On the plus side there are always spaces in the car park because I think most people keep driving until they get to the Tesco Extra a mile away

I have a (light hearted) theory that they are being used as a front to perform some kind of psychological experiment on shoppers, as I always end up feeling agitated, on edge and desperate to leave after about 10 minutes.

Firstly they installed barriers at the entrance that immediately malfunctioned and constantly beeped, although thankfully they are now all broken. They play terrible 90s pop at a slightly too load volume over tinny speakers. They seem to pride themselves on having no baskets, leaving no choice but to awkwardly have to ask people in the self-checkout queue if I can come through and grab one. The whole store is grubby, especially the fridge with the special offer cakes near the entrance, and I won't risk buying anything made or packaged on the premises. The wine shelves are covered in some sort of debris and the staff like to leave bottles balanced on top, so trying to take a bottle is a game of wine Jenga. They also experimented with leaving half the lights off, although this seems to have been abandoned in favour of placing boxes of random Tupperware in the entrance. The self-checkout tills refuse to accept my bags about 50% of the time.

Don't get me started on the hazard of the mini shopping trolleys for children!

Surprisingly they seem to be ultra efficient at answering the buzzer to open the spirit shelves. Maybe delaying that will be the final test that will results in a riot in the local store.

‘Anyone know why it’s all French?‘

’Rami Baitiéh (born 1971) is a French businessman of Lebanese ancestry, and the CEO of the British supermarket chain Morrisons.’

He Used to work at Carrefour in France. our local supermarket when we lived in France was Carrefour, but we always drove 20 minutes to either LeClerc or U for the main shop, Carrefour was a bit tatty in comparison ( though they had very good cheese). I’m not sure a French bloke is the ideal fit for Morrisons , though I think that they were in deep merde before he took over tbf

Yes, for all the reasons you say. They have some products I like: fish, bread, sausage rolls but not enough to entice me in. They also oddly have a wine aisle that seems to be decorated as a middle Europe bier kellar that irrationally irritates me so much it stops me buying wine.

I'm going against the grain here as ours is pretty good, well stocked, very bright and the staff are pretty good too. It has to compete with a Waitrose and Lidl in our small town plus an Aldi close by. I probably use it more these day and I've made some very decent savings with the More card, unlike the My Waitrose card which is barely worth having these days.
My biggest gripe is the state of their car park which is full of enormous holes and, of course, is no longer their responsibility.

Fish in my one smells & is rank . We are coastal !

Come to Derbyshire then - the fish in ours is lovely and we’re nowhere near a coast.

I like mine, although they did do a rejig a while ago and I can never find the biscuits (opposite the freezers bizarrely).

The manager put a chair out for people if they need a rest halfway round the store. The bakery is good, it has a deli counter (Sainsbury's and Tesco got rid of theirs), a fish monger and a butchers. I live on my own so never need a whole pack of ham so I like that I can get a couple of slices.

Yes it has really gone downhill. Checkouts are really dirty, old dried up spills are very off-putting. Lots of gaps on the shelves despite the large number of shelf stackers part-blocking aisles. I was told they no longer pay for staff to stack shelves overnight.
Staff are still mostly nice apart from a couple of exceptions.
I have started to use different supermarkets now.

It didn’t occur to me that this was a national thing, I just thought it was our local one. Yes, lights switched off in multiple aisles, masses of empty pallets, basic ingredients unavailable and very grubby indeed.

My local has really started to pull things back recently ,
SE England ( Kent to be precise ) , one of the staff told me that theirs is quite a high performing branch so maybe they’ve pumped a bit more money into it ?
it’s still a bit tatty, toilets could do with a bottle of bleach down them , but the shelves are filled reasonably well and most of the things they
have on offer are in stock even if you do have to ask for one from out the back !
Staff are on the whole a nice bunch but have noticed that there are cameras everywhere , unsure if due to shoplifting , but maybe they’re scared to be anything but helpful for fear of being reported ?

There's a store we stop at enroute to see our son every 2 or 3 months. We've been going there for 2 years now. There are only two cubicles in the public toilet and the one on the right has been "out of order" every single time we've been. If they can't afford to repair a broken toilet, then they really have given up. At busy times, the queues for the loo are ridiculous.

I think the US buyers are deliberately winding it down to either asset strip and sell the entire chain, or to sell the "prime" stores to other supermarket chains piecemeal. We don't have a big Tesco in our town, but there's a big Morrisons - it's not too far fetched to see Tesco being keen on acquiring the site as it has a large car park and petrol station, so would make a good "Extra" store for them in a town where they currently have nothing.

Ours hasn't gone downhill as its always been shit! Not shopped in there for months now.
It's grubby has out of date food on the shelf and disgusting freezers

Ours never has the heating on. I live in Scotland, I have no idea how the staff cope in winter.
Several of the freezers are broken, items in the freezers are often in half ripped open boxes and it has a general air of grubbiness and lack of care.