Sunday weekly review: 31/05/2015
It has been a while since I have made a post, that is partly due to my own lack of motivation and lack of time to put fingers to keys. It is about time I did a weekly review on our frugal spending habbits, and I have to say that this week was particularly good. This week, we have gone onto a water meter - so we are hoping that this will save us a few hundered pounds a year. We have all the water saving gizmos and gadgets fitted already, hopefully with a bit of due diligence, we will not be flushing money down the drain any more. We have had a bit of a battle with Pets at home, and we have come out victorious. There is more about this in my previous post - HERE fortunately we won the battle and are now £52 up ;)_
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I don’t like shopping at Pets at Home. I have previously written about their inflated prices for meat rabbits and cages - http://peapodwine.weebly.com/our-blog/bringing-home-the-bacon-well-at-least-the-rabbit Sometimes, needs must and we had to overlook the poor service and inflated prices. We needed chicken feed - due to an oversight and bad planning on my part we were running rather low - so I hopped online and ordered 2 sacks of layers pellets and 1 sack of corn feed to be delivered to my local store. Brilliant - they would be there the next day the Pets at home website said before I ordered it. Paying £39.50 for chicken feed is a bit pricey, but we were not able to get to our local feed store before we ran out of feed. I completed the online process, paid via paypal and received my paypal receipt for the goods - but, no email confirmation from Pets at Home - nor was my order showing up in my Pets at Home account. An hour later, I telephoned Pets at Home customer service to find out if my order had been processed. I spoke to some one called Louise, who seemed proactive and told me that the system had crashed after taking my payment but before the order had been processed. She asked me to send her an email with the details of the order and she would process it manually. Brilliant, email sent and I put the issue to one side, having confidence that Pets at Home customer service would provide . . . customer service. Alas, a few hours later - I still had not received any email confirmation, Louise had promised that she would email me. Back on the phone to customer service - Louise was busy on another call, but she would phone me back I was told. Did she heck. I waited for the phone call, 4 hours later I got back on the phone to chase her up. This was my third call to Pets at Home to work out if they had processed my order, or just taken my cash. Talk about poor customer service from Pets at home! This time on the phone, I did manage to get through to Louise, who reassured me that she had processed the order and it was all sorted, no need to worry and that my order would be delivered to my local branch the next day, and that I would receive an email very shortly. Did this email come? Did it heck - Back on the again for the fourth time, only to be told that Louise had gone home for the day and would be back after the weekend. This time, I spoke to a customer service agent called Hannah. The information I gathered from Hannah, is that the first Customer Service advisor, Louise, had not sorted out my claim and had not actioned my delivery for the next day. I am sure that you can imagine my frustration that after 4 phone calls, waiting for call backs and emails that never appear, Iam told absolutely nothing has been done. Upon telling Hannah that I was most disappointed in the level of “customer service”, or lack of that I had received that day - she called me Patronising! Yes, Patronising because I was not happy about the dire service I had received. Hannah took a complete lack of corporate responsibility, not wanting to offer any form of apology for the issue and just passed the blame onto the system crashing and her colleagues not doing their job properly. After 25 minutes on the phone to her, being insulted and having to give the same details over and over again, she eventually sent me a confirmation email that my chicken feed would be delivered the next day. In all, it had taken me 8 hours of phoning, and waiting from payment to receiving a confirmation email. I took the details of head office as I did not believe the standard of customer service warranted being called service at all. Hannah, also said that she would email her manager to put her side of the story forward. At least phone calls are recorded so her managers can hear her calling me patronising on several occasions. Issue resolved - in the process I was left with further distain for Pets at Home. Would I shop there again? No chance. At least my chicken feed would be delivered to the local store the next day. Alas, this was not the last of the problems. Next day, I was heading out and received an email from Hannah, asking me to call her about my order. Apparently, their systems had crashed again and the delivery could not be processed in the warehouse. However, considering the issues I had had previously with the poor customer service, systems crashing and frequency of phone calls I had to make, they had put my chicken feed into a taxi to be delivered to my local store. At least I would be able to collect my items. Not only had they hired a taxi, but they had refunded my order so the chicken feed was free. I would like to thank Hannah for eventually offering a good level of customer service and taking a proactive approach to corporate responsibility. As for the initial customer service advisor - Louise, I can only assume that she was new and under training, or just had no passion or care about her role. Would I shop at Pets at Home after this experience? Not if I can help it! Would you believe it, we are well and truly trying to reuse and recycle as much as we can for our garden and two allotments. There is not a day that goes by that we don’t seem to acquire something, are given something or gather something that ends up as a beneficial addition to our garden. Recently, the Mrs has had to pop into a couple of coffee shops to pick up sandwiches for her office. She has started to bring back out something for herself - and I don’t mean a cuppa or a sandwich, heavens no, we wouldn’t spend a marked up price for something we could make at home for a lot less. She has been coming out of the coffee shops with their waste coffee grinds. These are absolutely awesome for adding to the garden. I am no expert in chemistry, but the coffee grinds are full of the nutritious trace elements that the plants love. We have simply sprinkled the coffee grinds over the beds and around the plants, hoping that they will gain an extra spurt of growth from the grinds. The best thing is, this fertilizer is fundamentally free to us, and will help us to have a better harvest! It is always a bit of a depressing time of the year, the time after you have planted all of your potatoes, onions, a whole array of seeds and the beds down at our allotments look so . . .empty. The soil has been worked and dug over, yet, although we know that things are happening below the surface of the soil, there is very little evidence for it.
The plots look so empty, and as well there is always that doubt at the back of our minds that they may not grow at all. Where would we be if the crops fail? What would we do? For us, as we are surviving on only what we grow and produce ourselves, a decent crop is essential. Fingers crossed! Every time we visit our plots we are ever hopeful to see new growth emerging from the worked soil. Top money saving tips.
Over the pst couple of months that we have been on a strict frugal diet of budgeting and contemplation, we have realized that there are three simple tips to getting personal finances in order.
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