Customers at Sainsbury’s have been left in a panic after text messages told them that their Christmas shopping was ready to pick up at incorrect stores.
The messages, which have been described as a technical glitch, had shoppers thinking they might have to travel miles to pick it up.
Shopper Email Confusion
As the texts began to go out, shoppers were looking at the messages in dismay.
One woman was told that her order would be ready to pick up in a shop near Edinburgh. The problem she faced was that she lives 280 miles away!
The customer from Grimsby in North Lincolnshire was shocked to read the store name. “This is my entire food order for Christmas dinner for six people – it’s turkey, vegetables and all the trimmings,” she said. “What am I supposed to do now? Christmas is ruined!”
Sainsbury’s are calling the situation a technical glitch, as the stores named were different from the ones that the customers had actually selected.
An hour after the messages went out, customers received another message from Sainsbury’s. This requested that they ignore the previous message – their orders had in fact been put together at the correct stores, and it was only an error that made the store name appear incorrectly.
The customer from Grimsby voiced fears after the event that there may have been some kind of data breach – and she was not alone. Plenty of customers headed onto Twitter and Facebook to ask why their orders were in the wrong stores.
A spokesperson for Sainsbury’s said, “We’d like to reassure customers their orders can be collected as normal. We’re sorry for any inconvenience caused by this technical glitch.”
They also gave assurances that there was no data breach involved.
Christmas Shopping Chaos
The time leading up to Christmas is key for temporary food recruitment, as shops know that they will be facing larger crowds than normal in the run-up to the big day. In fact, shoppers in the UK will make it the busiest day of the year in the week before the 25th – normally the weekend directly proceeding, as the rush is on to get last-minute presents and stock up on food.
76% of UK families serve up a turkey for Christmas, and last year more than 10 million of them made it to the table. We send around £22 billion yearly on the festive season, with the average household spending a whopping £796. £159 of this goes on food – a much lower number than you might expect, although still much higher than the £41 spent on decorations. The rest goes on gifts.
If you are looking for interim food jobs, there are always plenty of vacancies at this time of year – but permanent positions are more likely to come up once the rush has calmed down in January.
Waste Issues
Given the current buzz topic of food waste, it’s no wonder that people are highlighting this festive season as a time to cut down on food waste.
Sustainable creative Danling Xiao, who goes by the name of @mundane_matters on Instagram, shared a statistic on her feed for her followers about Christmas waste. In 2014, she says, 4.2 million Christmas dinners went to waste across the UK.
The statistics are fairly damning. The figure gives us the equivalent of 263,00 turkeys, 7.5 million mince pies, 740,000 slices of Christmas pudding, 17.2 million Brussels sprouts, 11.9 million carrots, and 11.3 million roast potatoes.
It’s a lot of food to go to waste – and food charities as well as homeless shelters and other organisations are calling out for donations across the Christmas period.
