Tesco ... going .. gone

Dear Sir Richard Broadbent

I thought it was careless when you lost your financial director, but things have got far worse than that.  Allow me to explain.

We have friends coming around to lunch.  More like family really than friends, except I don't like all my family (and they don't all like me) but these friends seem to like us a lot because they keep coming around.  Or perhaps they are just freeloaders.  Who knows?

Anyway, I thought I would make them an apple pie.  It is so easy.  After getting the wife to cut up the apples and peel them, and remove the cores you then get her to do something else with them that involves egg and milk and flour and baking for a while.  I had no idea cooking was so simple.

However, in among the flour and eggs and milk and apples is a critical ingredient.  Cinnamon.  We had run out of cinnamon so I walked down to Tesco to buy some more.  All they had was stick cinnamon.  Not the powder version, which is not only good for baking but also excellent for throwing in the eyes of unwanted door-to-door salesmen.

Now you can't make apple pie with stick cinnamon.  I mean, just think about it.  Every time someone took a bite, shards of the stuff would go flying everywhere and who wants to eat dessert wearing protective goggles and body armour?

So I made a cunning plan.  If I bought stick cinnamon and put it in a bag and hit the bag with a hammer enough times I would have powder cinnamon, right?  I asked the assistant who was unpacking boxes of Tesco substitute food where I could find hammers but he said you don't sell any.

Hmm.

Move to backup plan.  This is a dessert that uses the best biscuits in the world as a base.  Yes, I know that link goes to your competitor, Ocado.  Can you guess why?  That's right: because there aren't any dark chocolate Hobnobs in my local Tesco store.

Hold on.  I know.  I'll make them a jam tart.  We have all the ingredients at home except for the one crucial item: Hartley's No-Bits Apricot Jam.  No, you really cannot accept any substitutes here.  Which is why we won't be giving them jam tart, because there isn't any Hartley's No-Bits Apricot Jam in my local Tescos.

By this stage I had begun to realise there wasn't going to be enough time to make Boeuf Wellington.  Never mind, I thought.  I'll just pop around to the deli.  What?!?!?  Where's the deli?  Gone to where?  Chineham?  How the hell am I meant to walk there?

Fall back plan: buy some of that lovely fish from that helpful and pleasant man at the fish counter.  Golly, I thought the fish counter was here.  Where is it?  Oh, that's in Chineham, too, is it?  How very convenient.  Lacking fresh fish, how about a large tin of John West salmon?  Oh dear.

Now, Richard, I guess that finding a new FD is a tricky task.  But there is something worse than losing your FD.

Losing your customers.