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!
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The main thing that I want to do this forthcoming week is to pick up hops and grains from the local brewery where I also do a few chists per week. The spent hops from the brewery do make fantastic mulch and compost for the allotment, they are great to spread around the beds to prevent weed growth, and they are also really rich in all the essential minerals and NPK needed for healthy soil. They are also fab to add to the soil at the end of the growing season as they add a good bulk to the soil, and help with water retention. The grains that the brewery throws out are great as well, as the grains make awesome pig and chicken feed, and also do make brilliant compost. If you are ever passing a brewery, pop in and speak to the brewers, they are always more than happy to have a chat over a beer, and willing to see the back of their waste. With the general election looming in the UK, over the past few weeks I have been considering which of the political parties to vote for. These days, it is no longer a two horse race between labour and the Tories, but a new wealth of idealists are spreading their political propaganda. I am sure that many of these would not come close to picking up the governmental reigns in parliament, nor having a clue on how to effectively run the British Empire. There have been many chuckle worthy statements mentioned in the manifestos of late, but the one that I am currently rabbiting on about is a statement that the Green Party have launched. If they do get into power (unlikely), they wish to bring in an outright ban on keeping rabbits and chickens in cages. I quote from the Green Party website This has many issues both on a personal and an economic level. More eggs would have to be imported from Eastern European countries, where animal welfare is of a lower standard. Not only would this drive the price of eggs up, but also increase the carbon footprint and food miles. Is this really the aim of the Green Party? On a personal note, I can just imagine poor little Josephine giving her pet rabbit one final cuddle good bye before her Dad takes it to the bottom of the garden to snap its neck. After all, it would be the law! I do believe that animal welfare should be mentioned in political manifestos, but when such concepts have not been thought through, one does have to wonder how these so called educated politicians would rule Great Britain! Following on from my post where I talk about how we had decided to bypass the retailers and become our own producers, we took the plunge and made the commitment to produce as much of our own food stuffs as we can. This sounded daunting in theory, but when we sat back and realised the scale of what we were about to undertake, we had to question our sanity. We would need meat - we are not vegetarians, and any time we bypass meat from our diets we feel unsatisfied and needing a good plump fillet steak. How could we produce meat for the table, at minimal cost? Simply, we would breed our own rabbits. I will cover keeping rabbits for meat in a later post. We also had decided to keep chickens for eggs, which seems to be a new up and coming hobby for many people in this rural area. There is nowt better than tucking into a large egg, that is still warm from the chickens backside. What we really needed though was to grow our own vegetables, to have enough of a harvest to see us through the winter and spring. We have one allotment, that we have had for about three years, and to be honest, up until now we have played at being allotmenteers, and any harvest we collected was simply a bonus to our commercialistic shopping habits. However, we feared that the one allotment would not be enough to provide all the veggies that we would need. . . And so onto the hunt for more land!
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