A QUICK REPLY TO JOHN LEWIS

Dear Romily [not her real name]

Thank you for your reply dated Tuesday, November 29th, 2022. I’m grateful for your acknowledgment of the ‘hard time experience’ we’ve been having in purchasing the Arthur Price cutlery set. We appreciate the apology.

In your response, you gave us two options of stores which currently have the item in stock. One is in Kingston upon Thames, (where there are apparently 3 items) and the other is John Lewis, Cheadle, which (for reference) is a drive of 3 hours and 21 minutes from our current location.

You also very kindly provided telephone numbers for these stores - thank you. I rang them both, hoping once again to reserve the item.

You’ll never guess what happened, Romily! I was redirected to the call centre both times. I know! What are the odds?

I’m afraid this only adds to my growing suspicion that customers are now unable to call stores directly, even though you implied that we could. It is intensely frustrating.

In addition, the operative in your call centre went on to tell me that the price of the item in question is now a full £380, instead of its original discounted price of £190.

In effect then, for my wife and I to purchase the cutlery set from John Lewis, it would now cost us twice as much as it would have just a few days ago, and would also involve either (a) a jaunty trek into London, or (b) a 6-hour road trip, not including our already wasted trip to Oxford.

Far from helping us, your proposed solution is for us to go to even further trouble, at twice our own expense, for a product that even you agreed ‘might not actually be available’ when we got there.

Personally, I can’t see at all how any of this matches with Section 3, articles 93 and 94 of your constitution.

You claim that the Partnership will “aim to offer the best value in the marketplace for goods and services of comparable quality and availability”.

Well, for comparable availability, you might be interested to note that the same product is currently online and can be delivered to us from other retailers. Meanwhile for ‘best value’, please also note that we were able to purchase that same item, the 76-piece cutlery set, online, for less than half the price advertised by John Lewis.

I’m now escalating this because, once again, we believe John Lewis is better than this, and we want you to know.

Centralising call centres is certainly cost-effective for you, but it reduces your service quality, and isolates your customers. We don’t feel appreciated by your Partners in this experience, and unfortunately we’ve lost a little faith in your quality of service. Had there been a simple way for us to reserve the item on the day, we would have purchased it from you. Had there been a way for the partners to contact those stores and reserve the item, we would have done so. Your system let you down. And we think that is a shame.

Again, if there is any way in which you can help us, we would greatly appreciate it.

Kind regards