To err is human, but Asda’s treatment of Shakti, a registered blind shopper, in this week’s special ‘visual impairment’ Grocer 33 mystery shop, is unforgivable. Shakti was conducting a mystery shop at Asda’s Newton Abbot branch. Her treatment was disgraceful.
After being told to ‘just turn up’ when she called to organise the advance-bookable assistance of a trained colleague – which Asda claims to offer – customer service told her everyone was too busy. Even though the store was quiet.
After Shakti insisted that she needed help, customer service then tried to commandeer a car parking attendant. “I’m sorry, you’ve been relegated to help this lady – do you mind?” they asked the attendant. “What do you want me to do? Push the trolley?” the worker replied, before slouching off. So customer service roped in another car parking attendant.
Read more:
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Asda apologises after blind mystery shopper belittled by staff
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How supermarkets are failing blind and visually impaired shoppers
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Tesco scores highest in our visual imparement mystery shop
“Poor Joe, he did a great job trying,” said Shakti of her totally bemused helper, “but he had no knowledge of the store at all.” Meanwhile, shop floor workers stood around, “stocking shelves, wandering around and chatting to other shelf stackers”. And even when they “observed Joe helping me and saw he was struggling, no one offered to help”.
It was such a stressful experience for Shakti that she abandoned the shop. Not surprisingly Asda came last in our visual impairment mystery shop. But Asda is not alone in struggling to support blind and partially sighted (BPS) shoppers. And despite supermarkets investing in new technology and training to support BPS shoppers – as part of their diversity & inclusion programmes – our investigation shows experiences “vary hugely” from day to day, at the same store, let alone across a retailer’s whole estate.
What our mystery shopping survey and our wider investigation (p26) shows is that you can develop processes and procedures as much as you like but when implementing them at scale human error is inevitable. However, that’s no excuse not to keep trying. And every supermarket store manager in the country should read the comments of all our visually impaired mystery shoppers. Lessons need to be learned.
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