I hate Tesco - just for now

Having been alerted by Bryan Appleyard to the fact that Julie Burchill loves Tesco, I feel driven to say that I hate Tesco at the moment. I shop at my local Tesco normally and loyally. I don't normally love it - it's convenient, it's good value, and it's reasonable to good quality. But at the moment I hate Tesco, as I did at the same point last year. The reason is that they insist on playing "Christmas" music for the last few days before the big credit fest, and it drives me bananas. It's impossible to shop udner such conditions. At leat it is for me; loads of other people just go round the aisles with a slightly more pained than usual expression. I complained. Of course I complained. And I was told, there's nothing we can do about it, it's company policy. Anyway all the stores do it.

Correction. All the stores don't do it. Waitrose, about four hundred yards away from Tesco, doesn't. So Waitrose has had the benefit of my custom for the last few days. Even though the range is not so wide and the prices not so good, at least I can think there.

What a bone headed policy. I doubt very much that they have any evidence that people are spending more in their stores because of the music, and they do have evidence from people like me that we are spending less in their stores because of the music.

And what is worse is that in this Tesco at least, I have heard from the staff, there is no respite from it on their breaks. The music, for want of a better word, is being piped into their canteena nd locker room. No matter how long their shift they cannot get away from it. That's just cruel.

I'll go back to Tesco in the new year. Next year I'll ask them to let me know, if they persist in this cloth eared policy, to let me know when it's going to start so I can avoid it again.