Late one night, recently, I decided to search online for the opening hours of the Tesco store on Broughton Road. Before I could find the information, I stumbled instead across a gold mine of inspiration: Google’s customer reviews.
Three years ago, a certain Hayden Seymour wrote, ‘As an Englishman, I was worried that the groceries would be labelled in Scottish. Thankfully they were in English as Scotland seems to have embraced tourism!’
Quite possibly, Mr Seymour was being sarcastic and having a laugh at everyone’s expense (let’s hope so for his own sake), but for the purposes of this column, I’m willing to believe that his review was genuine.
What was he expecting? When I’ve gone shopping whilst on holiday in France, Spain and even Wales, I’ve never had any language trouble whilst buying an apple. Obviously there have been some items that I didn’t understand, but a banana is a banana wherever you are in the world.
Speaking of bananas, three years ago ‘A Google User’ gave an insightful review of the Broughton Road branch. This consumer said, ‘I found that bananas and some other varieties of fruit bought from this branch of Tesco have been badly bruised, not noticeable at the time but within a couple of days pretty obvious – I think some of the staff are careful but certainly not all – maybe training is deficient’.
Personally, I suspect that the supermarket’s training is of a higher standard and cleverer nature, that staff are conspiring against their customers by deliberately bruising the fruit from the inside in a way invisible at first to the naked eye. This makes you return to the store later to replace the items, impulse-buying other products while you're there and thus maximising Tesco’s profits.
Online reviews are both a positive and a negative for all businesses; one small review can go viral in a matter of minutes and can potentially ruin a business. Tesco’s Broughton Road, I don’t think you have anything to worry about just yet, but my request to you is that you label all your groceries in Gaelic. Wouldn’t it make the laborious weekly shop that much more interesting? However, please leave the fruit alone – they’ve suffered enough.