(NOTE: This one's shorter than the last post, if you couldn't be bothered to read that one.)

Turns out I'm not the only one being dicked over by the cunts at M&S. They do it to every company that has anything to do with them, it seems.

Someone I work with used to work at a pie factory called Bowyer's. They make pies for supermarkets all over the U.K, M&S included. Each supermarket / customer they get gives them a recipe for the pies they want making, and Bowyer's takes that recipe and puts all the ingredients into its pie-making machines, as per what the customer wanted. The rest is as simple as watching the pies effectively make themselves; it's mostly automated beyond the choice of recipe / ingredients.

Because there's often more than one type of pie being made at the same time (and since it's a BIG goddamn factory), occasionally the odd ingredient ends up in the wrong pie, or a pie gets sent to the wrong customer. Such is life when almost the entire factory is ran by computers; people get lazy about watching the equipment, and said equipment itself has no intelligence of its own, so shit like this slips through the cracks every once in a while.

Where does M&S come into this? They got a letter from one of their customers. This letter was full of praise at how much better their pies had gotten all of a sudden, and how this customer was going to buy them much more often now. Kind of the thing back-room workers consider a nice little pat on the back for their choice of ingredients....

....Except, said back-room workers hadn't done anything to the pie recipe. It had been the same for years, and this letter didn't make any sense to them at all.
It turned out that a batch of another supermarket's pies had been packaged up as M&S pies by accident. They were the same type of pie, but using a different recipe to the one M&S made up.

Now, get this: M&S actually COMPLAINED to Bowyer's about their recipe not being used. Think about that for a second. The only thing this "mistake" had done at all is win them the highest form of praise from a customer it is possible to get. Every other supermarket in existence would've just kept their mouths shut and enjoy the random good fortune while they could. But apparently, if you're an M&S employee, that is of no concern at all. The only thing that mattered to them was the petty principles of it. And perhaps the crushing reality that their over-priced pies were actually worse than the equivalent, reasonably priced products in other supermarkets (given the amount of praise in this letter, I'm guessing the pies were a LOT worse too!).

The really stupid thing is that this kind of self-limiting attention to detail is exactly what they use as their main excuse for their prices being more than twice that of other stores. They argue that because of all the extra care and attention they give to their food, it's worth the extra money, but it just isn't true. The extra money goes to fueling practices and presumptions that simply don't hold any logical weight whatsoever when it comes to determining how good the food actually is.

The one thing I've learned from my job is that supermarkets rarely, if ever, produce their own food. It's almost always ordered from independant producers, and those producers almost always make the same produce for more than one supermarket. All the supermarkets do is slap their own name on the packaging. So if one supermarket is trying to say it's inherently better than others by inflating their prices, in 99% of cases there'll be a much more reasonably priced version of exactly the same produce elsewhere... usually not more than a few hundred yards away, down the other end of the high street.

Fuck 'em. In the ass with a stick.