Complaints From 2018: M&S Pie

Remember when I used to spend time writing complaints in the hope of getting a £10 voucher which would keep me fed for a few days?

Well, I don’t do that nowadays. Partly because it isn’t worth the effort – I’m neither especially bothered about the hope of a voucher, nor does a total of 3 views really enthral me. Plus supermarkets are much tighter now – I do still complain when something is wrong, but it is more of a battle and, well, I can only be bothered if they’ve really pissed me off.

However, there are a couple of old complaints that I’ve never posted, that are sat in my inbox, and I’m trying to clear my inbox down.

So here goes – one from a sad birthday back in 2018:

Complaint to M&S

Message: 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 cr*p”. 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 day. 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 blooming 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 cr*p.

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 from Easter a permanent feature of your chocolate aisle that would be amazing – they were sublime.

Bye.
James

Response:

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.

Lessons

Well, I did get my gift card for £5.00. Though recently I got a new wallet and found some gift cards in there – so maybe I never spent it?

And those £4.00 doughnuts are now £4.75 doughnuts, from Doughnut Time, and are soooooo worth the money.

Don’t expect many more complaints from me. Think of this as like the good old days, when we used to argue about Brexit and I used to update you on the Metropolitan line signal status.