Morrisons refusing to remove Russian products from sale.

[Paintyourpaletteblueandgrey]

I went shopping to Morrisons last night. Wandering the alcohol aisle I found a full lit up display of Russian Standard vodka which is made in St Petersberg. Morrisons announced earlier that week that they, like all other supermarkets, were withdrawing all Russian products for sale due to the ongoing Ukraine crisis so I was quite surprised to see it there.

As I was leaving I spoke to customer services asking why the vodka was still on the shelves. The store manager came down with an email from the head office to show me. Basically Morrisons have withdrawn the vodka online but have decided to continue to sell it on their stores. Their view is that regardless of what is going on in Ukraine, they have bought the vodka and don't believe they should lose out on the profits for it (manager's words not mine). I asked why they had announced that they were banning Russian products when it was untrue and was told 'well why should we lose money?'

Am I being unreasonable thinking that Morrisons have just jumped on the Ukraine bandwagon with no actual intent to stand by their comments. They are putting money before morality. Surely we should be making a stand against Russia rather than paying lip service to them. I tweeted Morrisons last night but surprise surprise, they have ignored my tweet.

They've paid for it already. But we cab all vote with our feet by;

1. Contacting Morrissons via email/twitter/facebook and saying your boycotting the product/store til its removed.
2. Boycott the product and don't buy anything Russian yourself.

I work on customer services at a major supermarket (not Morrisons) and we got an instruction from Head Office to take all Russian products off sale this week and it has been nothing but a massive headache.

I really wish that we had just put signs up saying that we support Ukraine so once stock of was sold we would not be restocking for the foreseeable future. If the sales trends then changed to reflect customers boycotting those products then we could have removed them in a more coordinated and organised fashion over a few days.

Firstly the company sent out the information to stores in the middle of the day for immediate action (normally we get a notice in an evening to remove items from sale before the next trading day so the night staff can pull everything from the shelves, unless it is a safety issue in which case it is usually just one single item that needs checking and removing) whilst simultaneously pulling the items from our store systems. This meant that colleagues were dragged off their own departments to help the grocery colleagues pull all the affected lines from the shelves as quickly as possible and we literally had to block customers from taking items off the shelves.

We also had customers who had picked up items get really pissed off because they were taken from them at the checkouts because the system gave the till operators no option to sell it (all Russian products were flagged as "sale not allowed" which means we cannot sell it and we cannot override the system as it is usually only used for product withdrawals where we legally can't sell the items) and they then had to deal with customers ire when they had no idea why it was flagging up as managers and supervisors were still trying to get the message to every colleague about the items being withdrawn from sale.

We then had equal amounts of people unhappy because they couldn't get the items they wanted (it's not just vodka, there are many other lines and items that are either manufactured or owned by Russian companies that we also had to remove), unhapy as they had had items removed at checkouts/had been prevented from taking things from shelves or out of the stock cages by the staff removing them from the shop floor, and complaining because my colleagues were blocking aisles with the trolleys they were using to remove the stock lines ... most were mollified when we explained the reasoning but others still demanded to speak to the manager who was busy trying to coordinate the stock removals and wasn't best pleased to be pulled away from that to tell customers the same thing I told them.

Then, once all of thr products had been removed from the shop floor we have the issue of storage ... we have a warehouse that is tiny compared to our store size and it requires careful balancing between deliveries and sales to make sure we have enough stock available without the warehouse overflowing with unnecessary stock. Withdrawing multiple lines has had our warehouse literally piled up to bursting point as Head Office said we had to keep all removed lines on the premises (as opposed to sending them back to the distribution warehouse) whilst they coordinate a central return centre for the items to be stored, but they needed to be accessible so that when the wagons were sent to collect them they were ready to dispatch without having to move everything to get them out. I don't envy our warehouse manager as they have basically had to make the impossible happen this week and rejig the entire warehouse layout to accommodate these sale withdrawals.

@VelvetChairGirl

i see no reason why you want russian standard removed from sale, unless you are going to stop buying wheat products,crude oil based products, gold, gems or gold containing products, coal and any electric coming from a coal burning power station, or indeed products produced in factories using said coal (like stuff from china).

then you are frankly just being silly, vodka exports are tiny, stinks of token gesture just because it has "russian" written on it.

this

Don’t really understand the outrage here. The products have already been purchased, the manufacturers in Russia have already received the money so throwing it away is just wasteful and doesn’t do anything to help Ukraine.
Stopping future orders is totally different.

YABU and quite xenophobic.

Wow @melj1213
That does sound like a massive faff
In that context I think Morrisons have been sensible

I agree with Morrisons on this. You don't have to buy it if you don't want to. I can't believe people have so little to worry about that they're calling the manager. Just don't buy the stuff.

@Hont1986

YABU and quite xenophobic.

It is not xenophobic. The Ukranians are not fleeing a natural disaster. They are fleeing invasion by another nation.

Do you think the Olympic Committee are being xenophobic by not allowing ROC paralympians in the current winter paralympics?

@Hont1986

YABU and quite xenophobic.

Its not xenophobic at all. The OP clearly feels strongly about it, I presume she wants to show support with the sanctions thst the rest of the world are imposing on this brutal dictator over his invasion of Ukraine and murder of its citizens.

Russia clearly want to be a pariah state like North Korea, so every little helps.

This virtue signalling has become the new "I'm triple jabbed".

False equivalence.

Surely if they stop selling Russian Vodka they have to stop selling any Chinese-made products because of what the Chinese are doing to the Uyghurs and the occupation of Tibet? Where does it end?

Do we currently have economic sanctions against China? If you can’t understand why we are targeting Russian good, you aren’t paying attention. If you believe we should be sanctioning China, write to your MP, and to Government.

That does sound like a massive faff

Yes, unbelievable that a supermarket would make such a mess of it to the point where they were taking products off customers at the checkouts. This presumably was happening nationwide and I’m surprised it hasn’t come to light before now.

Can I speak to the manager for people like this should be, no you can't.

Riley is the ultimate virtue signaller.

I don't necessarily disagree with you there....

Yes, unbelievable that a supermarket would make such a mess of it to the point where they were taking products off customers at the checkouts. This presumably was happening nationwide and I’m surprised it hasn’t come to light before now.

No idea whether other stores had the same issues as mine did but I would imagine that at least some others didn't go smoothly either, presuming that the got the message at the same time as we did but in the grand scale of issues it was one day of massive chaos on the shop floor (and another weeks worth for the warehouse team) which is just another day in retail ... you'd be surprised by how often there's a huge clusterfuck situation going on in supermarkets, we can just usually keep it all behind the scenes and off the shop floor as much as possible, just in this case that was not possible.

I just wanted to share my perspective as a retail employee to highlight yet another example of how corporate head offices jump on a bandwagon (justified or otherwise) and issue kneejerk diktats to the stores without any consideration of the practicalities of their demands (ie sending out the notice to remove XYZ items from shelves whilst simultaneously removing XYZ items from our system as unsellable so that store colleagues are trying to figure out why XYZ was scanning just fine at 11am but by 1pm was unsellable; demanding items are removed from shop floors before they have coordinated a system to accommodate such a high volume of stock needing to be returned to distribution warehouses when they know that store warehouses just aren't designed to hold such a large amount of overstock etc) or how it is going to affect shop colleagues having to deal with the increased customer enquiries - whether they're complaining about availability of products or questioning why we are removing XYZ - because they never see the "real" face of the store as everything is always made to look perfect whenever corporate visit and they never speak to store colleagues, they only ever deal with the management team.