Complaint – M&S Birthday Pie (2018)

I guess as part of the HR checks, M&S didn’t think to look through their customer complaints to see if potential employees had ever written to them.

Phew.

Here’s one that I can publish, now I’ve passed my probation. From 2018. Yeah I have a backlog of these things.

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Dear M&S

A few weeks ago, I had a birthday. Actually, it was a few months ago, but hey, the point still stands. I’ve already lost track of what I was going to say.

Yeah I’m one of those complaint writers that always writes some long-winded nonsense that you really don’t want to read – all you want is “the pie was crap”. But you are not going to get that from me. Soz.

So it was my birthday. Once upon a time. It was a cold, miserable, dark January Monday. I was still in the beginning stretches of a 3 month detox, and even worse than that I had given up red meat too.

You may understand that I wanted to treat myself for my birthday, yet I couldn’t have any booze, I couldn’t have a steak – I couldn’t even have a bloody sausage roll. Or bacon sandwich.

I really wasn’t feeling my birthday so I tried to rescue it.

For breakfast, I had an avocado and halloumi muffin from LEON. It was quite nice – but it wasn’t an M&S sausage and bacon sandwich (I am a semi-regular for your hot breakfasts).

For lunch, I thought I’d treat myself to a donut from the new donut shop near work. Do you know how much they cost? £4. Seriously. £4 for a freaking donut.

I walked around trying to find a pie for dinner, but alas, there were no pie shops in the vicinity.

Then I had a moment of genius – M&S!

So after work, I went to your Moorgate store. I could only have the chicken pie due to my avoidance of red meat, and came across a real conundrum – the small pie was way too small for a manly man like myself, and the large pie was far too large for someone trying to lose weight.

What to do?

Well, it was my birthday so I bought the large pie.

Alas, it didn’t meet expectations. There was far too much pastry (shortcrust) and far too little filling. I was really quite surprised at the lack of filling – I’d expect that at Tesco (yeah, I know…if only I could afford not to). It tasted fine, especially with 5 litres of cement-like gravy on top.

But, yeah. I’ve come to the end of my pointless story and another 10 minutes of my life wasted along with a couple of minutes of your life wasted.

The pie was crap.

Soz.

I do still love you guys, and realised that the only reason I still live in the UK is M&S. Also, if you could make the Jazzie Eggs a permanent feature of your chocolate aisle that would be amazing – they were sublime.

Bye.

James

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Good morning James,

I’m sorry to hear the chicken pie you bought recently wasn’t up to our usual standards.

Like yourself, my birthday is in January and I’m yet to have a birthday where the day isn’t cold and dark. It must have been tough doing your 3 month detox, there’s nothing better than a nice steak or even a sausage roll and you couldn’t have these on your birthday!

We put a lot of time and effort into making sure our products are perfect, so it’s disappointing to hear something has gone wrong. Although it makes us determined to make it right again.

I want to make sure we can get this passed onto the relevant departments so we are able to keep an eye on what’s happened and make sure it doesn’t happen again. So we can do this we will need the product code for the product and this can be found either on the left side of your receipt or underneath the barcode on the packaging.

Once we have this information we’re able to feed everything back to the right people and we will be happy to issue you with you refund in the form of a gift card.

Thanks for taking the time to contact us, James and I hope you have a nice day.
Kind regards
Retail Customer Services
Your M&S Customer Service

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Jazzie Eggs didn’t even come back for Easter 2019.

Also – the M&S Gastropub chicken, bacon and leek pie is the bomb. Seriously amazing. I’m not just saying it because I work there.