advertisement


Rice and Mice

G

GruntPuppy

pfm Member
If any of you frequent Home Bargains, I would strongly suggest avoiding the Classic Taste range of microwaveable rice pouches. We bought 2 pouches last night to go with a curry I'd made, and one of them had a mouse in.

I phoned the store immediately to let them know, and have since spoken to Citizens' Advice - apparently trading standards aren't a public facing service any more, CAB handle their enquiries - I should get a call back within... 5 working days.

I've raised a complaint on the Home Bargains website. Time will tell with regards to how this is handled.

In the meantime, the rice and mouse (whom I now think of as "Risotto the mouse") are going in the freezer.
 
My terriers are partial to them too... Along with everything else that runs, flies, quacks, whatever
 
GruntPuppy said:
I've raised a complaint on the Home Bargains website. Time will tell with regards to how this is handled.
Click to expand...


Dear Mr Puppy

Here at Yumyum Microwaveable Pouches we endeavour to give our customers a fulfilling gastro-experience. Our quality control has been certified as ‘excellent’ and can usually be relied upon to filter out most small creatures. However, we are sorry to hear that on this occasion you feel it has not proved satisfactory. Please be assured that we are determined to reach out to our customers and have already taken on board your concerns. We hope that you will continue to enjoy the full Yumyum range - more succulent pouches are added to it regularly, so be sure to check at your local supermarket, corner shop or service station!

If you wish to contact us again, please call the Yumyum hotline (calls cost £2.50 per minute) where you will be able to refresh your acquaintance with Kenny G’s greatest hit.

Sincerely

Yumyum.
 
You’ll probably get a case of classic taste range microwaveable rice as an apology...
 
Wow! This one is a belter! This kind of incident is either a customer having a laugh, or an attempt at extortion, or a disgruntled employee going in for a bit of malicious contamination.
 
stevec67 said:
Wow! This one is a belter! This kind of incident is either a customer having a laugh, or an attempt at extortion, or a disgruntled employee going in for a bit of malicious contamination.
Click to expand...


Indeed. Many years ago I used to work with a Wyeth lab in Gosport and although not the department I worked with specifically they had a testing lab for customer complaints about their baby formula. They had a rogues gallery of items claimed to have been found in the tins of baby formula and they included large chunks of glass, nuts and bolts (presumably trying to say they were from the production line) and the most outlandish a dried up lizard that was not even native to the UK where the formula was made.

I look forward to hearing the response you get GP.
 
GgtNuV.jpg


Late night pic with flash... cold light of day reveals mouldy mouse, with tones of cooked flesh. Delish!
 
cutting42 said:
Indeed. Many years ago I used to work with a Wyeth lab in Gosport and although not the department I worked with specifically they had a testing lab for customer complaints about their baby formula. They had a rogues gallery of items claimed to have been found in the tins of baby formula and they included large chunks of glass, nuts and bolts (presumably trying to say they were from the production line) and the most outlandish a dried up lizard that was not even native to the UK where the formula was made.
Click to expand...
We get quite a lot of this. One of the favourites is nuts and bolts, and yes we can and do occasionally have something fall off the machinery but it's always stainless steel (304 or 316 grades) and people setting up a scam usually just use something they've got lying about so it's BZP. The other favourite is glass in dairy products, especially cream. Upon testing it's often borosilicate glass (Pyrex) which you never find used for food packaging or windows so the chances are that it's fallen in in the customer's kitchen when they were whipping it in, guess what, a Pyrex bowl. Another favourite in my dairy years was "a fly in my milk". If we got it back we'd do a phosphatase test on it. Phosphatase is an enzyme that's inactivated by pasteurisation so we use it as a pasteurisation verification step. A fly coming in with teh raw milk would be pasteurised so would pass phosphatase. A fly that had found its way in at the customer's house wouldn't, so we would be able to tell them this and suggest that it might well have flown in while the bottle was open in the kitchen. It's a fly after all, it's going to land on an open milk bottle and have a feed. If it's inside when you replace the lid, it's likely to drown and be discovered when you next open it.

One of the most amusing complaints was a customer who reported a Lego brick in their milk, and what were we going to do about it? Our very smart customer services person paused and listened carefully, and sure enough there was small child noise in the background. "Well, that's very interesting Madam, we are naturally very concerned about this. You see the thing is that we don't have any Lego bricks in our factories. None at all. Is that your children I can hear in the background? Oh lovely, how old are they? Do they by any chance have any Lego? Yes, lovely to speak to you too, thank you for calling."
 
The only way to get companies to take notice of complaints is to post to their Twitter/Other Social Media feeds. Then all of their followers will get to know about it.

Friend of mine did well by this route recently. Pair of walking boots fell apart after only about 20 hours of use. Store not interested -- they were over a year old and anyway all their old records disappeared after being taken over by Sports Direct. Company (in the USA) not interested - claimed they were an old model so could not have bought when they were. Bla Bla getting nowhere. Several, ahem, 'relevent' posts on the company fartbook and a single tweet and miraculously came a call to ask what size the new pair of boots needed to be!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.


advertisement


Back
Top