Tesco Extra – value added goods & services

If you have been to any Tesco outlets, you would have recognized this. Yes, this sounds like a very inspiring promise made by the business, however what you are about to see might make you squirm. OK, I might be going a bit overboard. But bear in mind, you might already have served what you missed.

Goods are to be neatly arranged on shelves, with the correct price tags printed and displayed in a clear fashion. That’s what we all perceived as the correct practice. For the Tesco Extra outlet I visited yesterday, they are doing something much more innovative. 

The section for fresh bean produce was a warzone. Items were chaotically stacked on top of one another. Customers who walked past this particular shelf was disgusted and none of them lifted their fingers on the goods, except me of course. My investigation produced horrific findings which made Stephen King’s best sellers looked like paperback romance novels. Perhaps hardcover, but nevertheless still romance novels. Based on the outlook of the produce, you can vividly imagine dinosaurs stomping around them, during an era when men were a part of the food chain. If I have thrown a piece of the bean curd at another person, I would have been a convicted murderer.

Packed prehistoric bean curds were put into the same dish as some loose prehistoric tofu, or at least what are left of them. The container was half filled with milky looking liquid which I doubt was there for less than 3 days. There was also something which looked like a durian seed inside there, happily taking a bath with its friends. Makes me wonder what the tofu tastes like…

A closer look at a pack of tofu puffs showed signs of life. An intelligent life-form has started to build colonies on the yummy puffs and I am pretty sure they were having a good time. After rummaging through the shelf, it was concluded that there many more micro colonies mushrooming elsewhere.

Being a civic minded person, I showed a customer service executive my findings and much not to my surprise, he just threw the packet of puffs I showed him back onto the shelf and said “Ok-lah, you write a complaint form, our store manager on duty will call you”. He then returned to the customer service counter without taking any action. When I left the place half an hour later, he was chit chatting happily with his friends while the tofu pieces sat quietly enjoying their milk spa.

So do you want to know what the tofu tastes like?