Seriously, fuck Marks & Spencer.
I used to have respect for them, seeing as how their oldest store (105+ years and still going) is in the heart of the city I went to uni in, but now they're just cunts to me.

Why? Because of 2 things:
1. Their food range.
2. My job.

As some of you might know and not care about already, I'm a microbiologist. It's my job to make sure the good people of southeast England aren't killed by diseased food products in supermarkets here. Recently, we got a job contract from one of M&S' suppliers; a company called Provenance. I've only been dealing with them for the last 2-3 weeks, but I'm ALREADY sick of the shit we get off of M&S over their share of the Provenance produce we test. There are 2 main beefs I have with it:

Firstly, it proved beyond ANY doubt that their food is indeed overpriced.
The stuff we get for testing from Provenance goes to 3 different supermarkets: M&S, Sainsbury's and Tesco. I kid you not, the ONLY difference between the 3 batches of food is the packaging. Microbiology testing basically involves dissecting anything you get sent to make sure you've got a representative sample of the stuff, and after taking all of Provenance's samples apart, lemme tell you: there is NO difference whatsoever between the contents of M&S' products and the equivalent Tesco / Sainsbury's crap. It comes from the SAME fields, is packaged in the SAME factory and handled by the SAME people. So the next time you see one of those "This is not just food, this is M&S food" adverts on the TV (you know, the ones that try to justify them having price tags that are often more than double those of other supermarkets?), feel free to go out and punch the first M&S employee you find for being a lying sack of pretentious vegan-shit. You'll be doing the world (well, my world) a favour.

Now, if this was the only problem, then I'd be totally fine with M&S. There are loads of other high-priced stores out there that do exactly the same thing (Waitrose is another one: their stuff comes from the same supplier that makes food products for Asda and Co-Op, just with a different package and an inflated price tag). But oh, if only that were the sole problem I have with them.
You see, they aren't just content with being pretentious fuckfaces towards all of their customers. Oh no, M&S like to take it one step further. They like to be pretentious with their quality control standards too. And this is where my MAJOR beef comes in:

Put simply: They waste their own money, our testing reagents, and EVERYONE'S time by ordering microbiology tests they don't need. It started off as ridiculous, and has recently reached SUPER-ridiculous levels.
It all revolves around E.coli tests. The normal E.coli test is a very simple method involving an easily made reagent we have bucketloads of, and takes as little time as a microbiology test can take. Processing all of the samples would take no more than half an hour if that was all they wanted as far as E.coli was concerned.

BUT NO.

Instead, they want the "super-sensitive" E.coli test, which is a ROYAL pain in the ass to do, isn't really that much better at picking up E.coli anyway, uses expensive-as-hell reagents that are very difficult to make, and takes 4 FUCKING HOURS to finish, on ALL of their shit.
This test is not meant to be used unless you have strong evidence to suspect your produce has been contaminated with E.coli, but they don't care; they want to use it like a normal test regardless. Ironically, Tesco and Sainsbury's are happy with the normal test for their share of the produce (which, remember, is exactly the same food in a different package), but M&S just want to be stuck-up dickwits about it.

And that's just the normal level of ridiculous we get off them! They've recently started taking it to a whole new level of stupid:
They've started ordering tests for E.coli 0157, which is a dangerous strain of E.coli that can cause food poisoning much more readily than normal E.coli. Makes sense to ensure it's not in your food, right? Most food companies do indeed order the test for 0157 every month or so to make sure it's not anywhere in their produce, and I would'nt have a problem with M&S doing the same.

BUT THEY DON'T.

Instead, they want the test done 12 TIMES A DAY.
EVERY. SINGLE. FUCKING. DAY.
This little gem of incompetence has come from one of their shelf-life tests. Again; we're testing the shelf-life of the same products for all 3 aforementioned supermarkets: the other 2 are being sensible and only ordering the 0157 test at the very end of the testing. The morons at M&S want the test done as many times as possible, for no good reason. Remember being told not to put maths answers to 73 decimal places in class? That's basically what these tools are doing with microbiology results: Spurious accuracy just for the hell of it.

Why's this so bad? Well, it's not for the difficulty of the test itself this time: it's no harder than a Salmonella or Listeria rest (which we do dozens of times a day without breaking a sweat). The problem here is that one of the ingredients for the test is LITERALLY worth its weight in silver, and THESE CUNTS HAVE DRAINED 6 MONTHS' SUPPLY OF THE STUFF IN 2 WEEKS thanks to their 'all day, every day' mentality towards it. We can't make the ingredient ourselves; we have to order it, and because of the price of it, the order has to go through head office, which can make actually getting the stuff back in stock a very slow process. MUCH slower than what fucking M&S are using it up for. Ergo: We're fucked if anyone else wants an 0157 test for the time being.

Oh, and it gets better. Yes, it gets even better.
Remember me mentioning Listeria up there? Basically there are 2 tests for it we do: Presence / absence and enumeration. The presence / abcense test just tells you if the food's been contaminated with Listeria or not; the enumeration test tells you how bad the contamination is. It is generally accepted practice to perform a P/A test first, and then an enumeration if, and only if, the P/A test comes back positive for Listeria.

How have M&S managed to fuck this up? They order the enumeration test AND the P/A test, on ALL their stuff, at the same fucking time! This basically translates into us wasting a HELL of a lot of reagents we actually need for the tests that turn positive, for no good fucking reason again! There is absolutely NO sense to doing an enumeration test before you even know there's any Listeria there at all, besides them being impatient twats and thinking they're somehow more important than all the other customers who need the test done when things actually do test positive for listeria. M&S are not only fucking themselves over by wasting money on tests that don't need, they're actually dragging down our ability to give timely reports to other customers too, which in turn slows down the entire chain of food production for them (you can't sell food unless it's been declared safe; we can't declare it safe until we do the tests; no declaration = supply chains grind to a halt). Ordering tests you have no reason to believe you actually need (hell, I'm sure by now they know they DON'T need them, but are still doing them anyway!) serves no purpose than to make everyone else's life a misery.

All in all, it takes 10 times as long to process this crap as it should, all because the amount of work we have to do, the amount of things we have to make, and the time we have to spend on it, is being padded out with pointless douchebaggery on behalf of Marks & Spencer's Quality control team. So the next time you see something in M&S' food aisle that looks good, remember: there's probably a very easy way of getting the same thing for half the price at another shop, and avoiding them like the damn plague will make your wallet (and my blood pressure) very happy. If it were up to me, they'd be out on their dumb asses by now, but alas, that is not my decision. Fuck!

TL;DR: Don't buy food from Marks & Spencer. They make me RAAAAAAAAAGE!!

(P.S: Still don't know if staying or not. Previous newspost is still there, and will be until I know either way if I'm staying or not. Shouldn't be too long until I get a definite answer, though.)