I'm one of those older people who relies upon being able to
use the shallow draught style of trolley pictured on the modified wild West
wanted poster (below). As a blind person, it isn't so much getting the products
off the shelves and into this trolley, it's getting them back out again, once
I've got as far as the checkout. It's only me that can do this and, if I'm
forced to use one of the deeper trolleys, I can't always guarantee to find
everything.
Some time back, the manager of my local branch of Tesco
decided that she would have some kind of customer survey as to where it was
that customers most felt that they wanted their trolleys to be stored. If you
stop and think about it, this is a bit of a weird survey to hold, in the first
place. After all, there were well used trolley collection points all around the
customer car park and one specific area immediately adjacent to those parking
bays are set apart for people living with some kind of physical disability.
When we arrive at Tesco, it's my job to go around to the back of a car and
unship my wife's mobility scooter. The next job should be going and getting a
supermarket trolley. To this end, there is an area set apart for putting all
the supermarket trolleys together, immediately adjacent to the aforementioned
parking bays for people living with some kind of physical disability. Sounds
okay so far, doesn't it… but there's no accounting for the insanity that can
creep insidiously, into so-called ordinary life!
Imagine my surprise when all of the supermarket trolleys
mysteriously vanished from the aforementioned area (near all the disabled
parking). The trolleys had been whisked off, safely indoors and corralled
around the bottom of one of those moving walkways that slants up or down
depending on whether you're entering or leaving the store. As these walkways
were a goodly distance away from the accessible parking, I had to wonder about
the sanity (or apparent lack of it) underlying this decision.
I tried asking some quite reasonable questions about this and
was informed about the survey as though it was the answer to everything! It
didn't seem to matter that there was now a lively trade in the shallow draught
trolleys favoured by people living with mobility problems, as they made their
way back and forth between the disabled parking and the lifts (a lot nearer
than the moving walkways and more often used by people with mobility problems).
I don't have mobility problems of my own, but neither do I
have eyesight that is all that good. My wife can, of course, send me off in the
direction of the moving walkways and hope that I might come back with an
appropriate design of trolley, but there would be no guarantee of this!
Getting nothing by way of a sensible answer out of the local
management, I did try going as far as the store customer service, only to have
the store policy recited to me, as though it made the greatest possible sense.
What I the only sane person around? Had all of the staff at the store
collectively taken leave of their senses? All questions that I felt I was
entitled to ask not only myself, but anybody else who might listen (although
they did seem to be remarkably few people who fell into this category and owned
any responsibility). There were, so it seemed to me, a comparatively large
number of inconvenienced people with physical disabilities that were getting a
rough deal out of all of this nonsense!
Taking the matter still further, to the Chief Executive
Officer, brought new hope and this was short lived. Again, it seemed as though
there was an initial impetus and this faded away to nothing, apparently without
anything like a reasonable answer.
I tried raising hell at the customer service desk, in this
very store, today and I started to get answers that I hadn't received
previously. Apparently (according to one manager) trolleys kept going missing
from the area that they had been entirely removed from. This was blamed on the
local student halls of residence! Apparently Tesco staff had done some kind of
foray into these premises and had recovered something like 80 shopping trolleys
left around the inside of this building. It's hard to imagine this staggering
quantity of supermarket trolleys being left abandoned in any building without
them getting in the way of life going on as normal! This story didn't exactly ring
true, but I didn't know what else to make of what was going on.
According to the aforementioned manager, they had yet more
of these shallow deck supermarket trolleys on order and the idea had been
kicked around that perhaps the store or to abandon the idea of not having any
kind of coin-operated deterrent to removing the trolleys and not bringing them
back! Clearly the whole situation has been running for some time and without
anything like a workable solution being arrived at (and all through this time,
of course, people living with disabilities were being inconvenienced in a way
that they truly didn't deserve)!
