I woke up this morning, with a slightly sore head from the night before. On the drive home, I decided popping into Tesco Abingdon was a good idea to get some lunch. Quick sandwich and a bottle of Lucozade, sounds easy. Far from it, if only I had been a mystery shopper.

What happened…

The car park was extremely busy, with only a couple of spaces free. The majority of these were being used by the car cleaning company who go around the car park cleaning cars whilst you shop. They have a little cart with them, these seemed to all be left in the way, filling up what little spaces there were. Bad start.

Into the store, plenty of sandwiches left, good good, now to the tills, 10 items or less tills, 2 of 4 open. 10 people in each queue, took 20 mins to get through. At least this gave me the chances to notice all the other stuff going on.

What I noticed, first off was the member of staff on his lunch break, in Tesco uniform chatting to a random person in the queue. Telling them how shit the company was, how it has gone down hill in recent years due to terrible store management. It went on and on.

The woman on the till next to me, looked rough as anything, didn’t take long to overhear the reason for this. She was very quick to tell all the customers how hungover she was.

The optician, yes Tesco have an in store opticians, however instead of doing anything with the 3 customers there, continued to paint her nails.

When I thought it couldn’t get any funnier, the alarm on the main door went off, looking over in a nosey fashion as you do, I saw the security guide not giving a rats, and continued his conversation with two people.

Now, why do I care? I worked in this store for 2 years a number of years ago. I know what you should be doing and what you shouldn’t, and what you can get away with and what you can’t. It appeared to me that in this half hour spent in store, standards have really dropped.