Your English assignment - compare and contrast staff in different chains of supermarkets

Oh no! Not another Supermarket article! Yes, another one! Having given my guide to the supermarket experience in a previous article, and having complained about shelf stacking, bread, charity bag packers, naughty children and polluted salads, I thought I would look again at Safeway and their staff's attitude. I've had good experiences with them in the past, this article is born of more recent experiences.

I wonder whether Safeway put their staff through special attitude training. I've definitely had more memorable good experiences with the staff in my local branch than the "colleagues" who work at the larger Asda store I visit more regularly. I only visit the Safeway store when I have to - it's usually far too busy and it is more expensive than Asda, with less of a range. However, as the local supermarket, which I drive past on the way home from work, it is often a place I find myself. Luckily, experiences with the staff there are, on average, a suitable compensation for their other failings... and they have good potatoes.

Sure, there have been bad moments, but I remember Safeway staff more clearly for the priceless moments of good service. Asda's staff, on the other hand, are memorable for completely irrelevant reasons, we have:

• Checkout Barbie - the lady who is old enough to know better and who has bright pink tinted hair
• The Posh Old Dame - she's near to retirement, she's posh and usually cheers us up on a weekend
• Cheerful and slow - she's a nice Asian lady who ensures that every item is closely checked before passing through the checkout - you'll spot her, or at least her queue, a mile off
• The cheese counter nose-miner - he's not worked at Asda for a long time, but I still remember him.

Sure these are all colourful characters, and we should not forget the man at Tesco who had a go at me for making the CD player skip (I hadn't touched it, but was going to touch it to stop it skipping when he came barging round the corner full of accusations). However, what about moments of good customer service? Here are three tales of service which made me smile.

We have:

• Nine Items or Fewer
• The Petrol Discount
• Cutting it Fine

Read them and weep!

19 April 2002
Ashley Frieze