Parent friendly supermarkets | Open Letter

OPEN LETTER TO SUPERMARKETS FROM PARENTS

Dear un-parent friendly supermarkets (I’m looking at you Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Morrisons and Asda),

We are being reminded constantly that Aldi and Lidl are beating you in the food wars , so I thought I’d pass on some market research on what you can do to be parent friendly supermarkets. This research has been conducted specifically with parent shoppers who need your companies to up their game in order to get them to part with their money. Babies ain’t cheap, as you’ll know, as you price up the Ella’s Kitchen pouches and the Pampers nappies… so by making these quick and easy changes we wouldn’t be full of hell when we get to your shop and we would skip around throwing products into our trollies. Here are our ideas…

  1. Sort your baby trollies out

Please don’t leave the trollies with the baby seats in the area you know you have a problem with birds nesting. It is vile, my local Tesco is an awful example of this and for almost 11 months, I and others have complained about this and nothing has been done about it. It’s dirty, unhygienic and would take nothing for your staff (who are frequently stood chatting at the customer service desk) to clean them and put them somewhere covered. Would you willingly put your baby in a bird shit covered trolley and then go and spend £100 in the place that has deemed that to be acceptable practice? Thought not.

How about keeping the trollies with the baby seats under cover in a trolley park? As above, are we going to spend money in your store after we’ve had to battle with a baby who is now unsettled because they are  damp due to sitting in your seat that we’ve had to wipe with whatever we had handy. Exercise a little common sense, please.

If you could also move your staff smoking area away from outside of the parent and child parking/only trolley park with baby seats in, that would also be swell.

Please also ensure the seat belts are actually working on the trolleys. Often Mummy Confessions has found trolleys with broken or no belts and it makes it difficult with a child trying to get out all the time.

 

2. Parking

Enforce a rule so that people who park in parent and child spaces are definitely parents with age appropriate children. Supermarkets seem willing to give tickets to those who park on their land without using the supermarket/staying too long, so why not enforce the child/parent spaces? Hey whinge pointed out that if she had parked in a disabled bay she would have been fined, but if disabled people park in P&C spaces because they are closer to the shop entrance, they don’t get fined.

It causes unnecessary stress for parents when they are attempting to shoehorn children out of cars when there are no parent and child spaces left, then they see Barry in the Range Rover pulling out of a parent and child space with no kids in his car, simply because he doesn’t want anyone to touch his precious car. Barry will continue this behaviour every time unless there are consequences for his actions, because Bazza only thinks about Bazza.

All supermarkets should have big spaces for parent & child. Mummytodex ‘s local supermarket is Asda and the P&C spaces are located near the store but they are normal sized spaces. It’s no good for her as she has to leave the trolley in the road while she squeezes her son out of the car worrying about damaging the car next to hers.

Also have baby trollies available at both sides of the parent and child parking areas if you have them at the different sides of the store. At no point are we going to unload our trolley in the car, push the trolley back around and carry the child to the car. Nor would we leave our children unattended, which means abandoned trollies for you.

 

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3. Checkouts for people with children

We would love a little more help with the checkout at the end. By the end of a ‘big shop’ most parents have exhausted our fruit and snacks, the baby’s whiny and the parents are stressed. However, we don’t want help with our packing, we want help unloading the trolley on to the conveyer belt (we can’t do the scan as you shop thing as the baby will think the scanner is a toy and throw a strop). As suggested by Devon Mama , if supermarkets directed shoppers with small children to one or two checkouts it could be possible to provide that help. The Tesco free fruit scheme was favourably mentioned by many respondents, if this couldn’t be rolled out en masse, maybe it could be something brought in for these checkouts?

 

4. Sort out your home delivery

Obviously we wouldn’t need any of the above doing if your home delivery systems and networks were just a little bit better. Parents such as A Mum Full of Dreams would love to use your home delivery networks but she doesn’t trust you to provide the freshest fruit and veg or suitable replacements.

TRUST comes in to a lot of these minor modifications. If we could trust supermarkets to not put barriers in our way before we even get to the products on the shelves, maybe we would spent a little more time and a little more money in store.

Yours Sincerely

iamcrabstix

on behalf of respondents in New Mummy/Daddy Bloggers group on facebook