Out of Date products and bad customer service

When I dragged the kids around Asda earlier today grabbing a few bits of shopping ready for our return from holiday I spotted some great bargains on the shelves. There was loads of cooking sauces such as Ragu, Chicken Tonight and some of Asdas own all reduced to around 50p. This was great I thought and I bought a good selection. Perfect sauces for the slow cooker for my first week of childminding, or so I thought.

On my return home as I was placing the items into our cupboards I saw a date out of the corner of my eye.

This date…

As I emptied my cupboards again I found products that went out of date in February, March and May this year. Ok so not as bad as November 2011 but still. As a childminder I could have got in serious trouble for serving this to the children I mind but who checks the dates on products you have only just bought!

In total I found 9 products that were all out of date.

I phoned up Customer services who took the details of all the products including their barcodes and best before dates before informing me that I would have to take all the products back to the store for a refund or exchange. So he just wasted 15 minutes of my time (whilst the kids are running round the house like lunatics) before telling me that he cant actually help. Well thank you very much for nothing and no i really don’t want to go back to that store EVER! Why would I go back somewhere where I now feel I will have to check the date on ever product I want to buy. Why would I want to drive the 7 mile round trip just to return the sauces when really you should have apologised for the inconvenience and compensated me appropriately. Instead you really annoyed me with you could not care attitude and the fact that you only took the details of the products so that you could let the store in question know so that they could remove the offending items from the shelves. Well what about all the products I didn’t buy, are you going to check those? or are you just going to leave it to chance that they “might” be in date? I can tell you that when 20% of my shopping is out of date I would say that there is a good chance that there might be more products out there as out of date as mine, if not worse!

So I won’t be going back into that store or any other Asda store until I receive an appropriate response from someone who can give me the confidence that when I am choosing items of the shelf that I wont need to check ever single date because believe me I just do not have time to do that.

I am so glad I saw that date because I dread to think how bad it could have been if I had fed that stuff to the kids.

What do you think they should do? Do you shop at Asda?