Grocer delivers a refund – ten months too late
Ms E.N. writes: I am requesting your help in recovering payment taken from my credit card by Sainsbury’s for an order that was never delivered. I have written to the chief executive but this clearly has not worked. My letters remain unanswered.
THIS is a classic example of how a huge company can turn an everyday problem into a minor scandal, simply by treating a customer badly and then by treating them even worse.
You are 87 years old and pretty much housebound. You ordered a delivery of groceries costing £97 from Sainsbury’s in Frome, Somerset, which was due to arrive at your home on April 23 last year.
The delivery did not arrive, and you were told the van had broken down. You were asked to collect the shopping in person, but there was no way you could do this.
You were then told that your only option was to cancel the order and submit a new one. You did this, and the delivery was made on April 25, with Sainsbury’s collecting £105 from your card. You were told in an email that you would not be charged for the first, undelivered order, but when your card statement arrived you found that Sainsbury’s had taken both the £97 and the £105.
This should have been sorted out with one phone call, but the Frome store told you that the company has no complaints procedure and no address to which any complaint could be sent. Staff there told you that if you wanted to press the matter, you would have to go to the store and show the manager all your credit card statements from April onwards, to prove that you had been charged and never refunded. You twice wrote to Simon Roberts, the chief executive of Sainsbury’s, but he did not reply.
All this has dragged on for months, but after I contacted officials at the supermarket’s head office last month they sorted it out within 48 hours, showing what could and should have been done in the first place.
One told me: ‘We should have identified there was an issue with the store processing a refund for the original, cancelled order and this should have gone through back in April.’
That should have been the end of the story. It wasn’t. You were given a number to call to claim your £97 refund, but when you called, you were told it was not possible now to claim a refund from as far back as April. When you explained everything that had happened, you were offered £50.
After you resisted and the speaker transferred you to a colleague, you were finally told the full £97 would be credited back to your card. Sainsbury’s has also credited £30 to your online shopping account, which does not seem a lot to make up for ten months of stress and struggling with one of the biggest companies in the country. And it could all have been avoided as long ago as April.