Published on 12, July, 2020
I'm just writing to a well known food chain, advising them of some shortcomings I am experiencing with their home delivery process.
Post Pandemic, I've realised just how much I utterly hated going "shopping" and I realised we are really invested now in home delivery!
(So much, that I'm actually attempting to get the process to work a bit better)
I wondered if it's just me, or is this a more universal Autism thing?
For those of you who don't like to post or vote, this is a very simple question, and you can possibly excercise a bit of power if you have a strong feeling about shopping.
We constitute about 1/50th of the population if I have my facts correct, (I may not when it comes to that number) so IF we turn out to be "all of one mind" it's worth "niche influencers" like myself (I KNOW companies, and even lawmakers, can be influenced by a well written complaint, as I've been doing it for years! I claim credit for killing a Kellogs ad campaign in the nineties with a particularly vitriolic communication to the right department and the part of U.K. drone law that lets your kids (and me!) fly a toy in your own back garden...
Complaining is like planting seeds, and waiting to see which ones sprout. For those who are lacking in funds and powerless it's a very cheap hobby, too.
You just have to do it creatively, and not "whine"...
So how do YOU feel about a trip to the shops?
NO! Is the short answer.
Too many people, much too stressy most of the time.
My real pet peeve is when stores reorganise stuff. Their idea is that if they switch the locations of your favourite pasta, you'll pass other temptations and slip some of them in the trolly while you are hunting for the pasta, instead of going straight to where you used to know that the pasta was. All this means for me is endlessly hunting around the store trying to read the signs with the wrong glasses or trying to attract the attention of an assistant to tell me where the pasta is, while I spend rather longer in there than I wanted to.
Why can't they just leave things alone so I can wizz around the locations I know my dinner is located in, pay and be gone?
I've always hated shopping but in the pandemic I really couldn't cope. In addition to the usual sensory discomforts, all that pasta hunting, whilst simultaneously trying to track every other individual around me to ensure I was 2 meters away while they all keep moving and I can't read the product labels for the steaming glasses... literally too much information for my processing! and yes, I did melt down. That had never happened in a supermarket before. It was probably the extreme COVID anxiety on top of the processing difficulty. How embarrassing!
Dawn said:Why can't they just leave things alone
It's even more of a nightmare for employees, first you have to swap everything with no extra time to do it, then if you weren't the person doing it and you come restocking you can't find anything and job is taking longer with no extra time to do it
Plus stores are packed already and this way they keep customers milling around aimlessly