I've just had an email from Ocado about marmalade. It's toecurlingly twee.
So, all in all, we’re replacing one jar (marma-trade), keeping 24 (marma-stayed) and introducing nine (marma-upgrade) to our marmalade range. So, whether you’re a fine peel, thick peel or no peel, from September, at ocado.com, you’ll have a better range of marmalade – and everything else, too. And we can’t wait to share it with you.
The gist is they will no longer stock the one jar of marmalade they get from Waitrose and it will be replaced by lots of new M&S marmalade and they will still have everything else. My response to that is suspicion. This is like a train or bus company slashing the timetable of a service they no longer want to run until eventually there's one bus every other week leaving at 4am if there's an R in the month, and then saying there's no demand for that route any more so they're scrapping it. Surely they used to stock far more than one type of marmalade from Waitrose?
Slowly but surely various Waitrose own brand products I got from Ocado are going out of stock and not re-appearing. I don't mind that much if there's a decent Ocado own brand equivalent, but there isn't always. I confidently expect the M&S own brand stuff to be far more expensive than Waitrose.
I think there may be a parting of the ways on the horizon.