How many more reasons do you need? (Morrisons)

Member Name: Bad_Kitty

Product:	Morrisons
Date:	05/03/02 (2947 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Cheap, good quality food

Disadvantages: Very busy on Saturdays- go on a Monday evening if you want it to be quieter!

As a student in Yorkshire, Morrisons seems to be the ideal option for providing good quality food at affordable prices. Living in the stoodent-ville that is Headingley (in Leeds) there are enough shops to provide you with everything you need- there's a small but fairly well stocked Safeways around the corner from my flats, but it is rather pricey when compared to Morrisons' excellent value for money, which means although I'm a poor student I can afford not to live on beans on toast! So I like to take my car to Morrisons in Kirkstall, a couple of miles away from Headingley. Yes, I'm very very sorry that I have my car at university with me and I don't have to carry heavy carrier bags from the bus stop when I go shopping - NOT!

I should also add that during my A levels I had the, um, privilege to be an employee of Morrisons in Crewe, I worked there from when the store opened in October 2000 for almost a year when I fled to Leeds, only to find they'd followed me, and there was approximately 1,000,000,000 Morrisons stores in and around Leeds, so I work in the Kirkstall store now. The Kirkstall and Crewe store were built at almost exactly the same time (both opened 2000) and consequently are almost identical inside! Which does have the advantage that I know where everything is in both stores!

Morrisons offers excellent value for money, that cannot be denied. They've always got buy one get one free and money-off offers, so you'll always find something that you want/need/can't live without on offer. On my last few trips I've bought pasta, toothpaste, Sharwood's curry sauces and jam on BOGOF (and that's just the things I can remember now), all things you can keep in your cupboard for ages. So yes, I have a wardrobe full of Morrisons pasta twirls and my cupboard in the kitchen is starting to bend slightly under the weight of 6 jars of Sharwoods sauces! Their products, even when not on offer are generally chea
per than other supermarkets, eg 4 pints of milk, Safeway's price 99p, Morrisons price 93p.

They also have an excellent range of products, their fruit and vegetables are always fresh and of good quality, they have an excellent range of things for home baking, all types of herbs and spices, everything you need to cook "authentic" chinese and indian, etc meals, and at reasonable prices, you can get fairly big packets of curry powder for about 50p. They also have a wide range of frozen ready meals if you don't like cooking. Their "Street Departments" (I work on the Deli) also provide all the fresh food you could possibly want, there's an excellent selection of fresh fish (it might smell but their salmon is yummy), freshly made pizzas and salads (every kind you could possibly want), the Deli where lovely assistants called Emily were always polite and helpful to even the most awkward of customers, which also has an extensive range of cheeses, mini pies,cooked and continental meats and indian, chinese, and mexican "takeaway" meals. Then there's the pie shop with lots and lots of different pies, cooked chickens and more, the cake shop (where I spend about half my money, the other half going on fresh pasta!) with loads of differnt sorts of cakes all made freshly instore, the bakery with fresh bread, again all made instore. I recommend the 6 for 99p rolls, particularly the ciabattas. There's also a butchers where they have lots of meat and they'll cut it up and prepare it however you want it (don't know much about meat as I don't like it but there's always a bloke waving a big knife around). In Kirkstall we have the bacon on the deli, at Crewe it's on the Butchers, but we seem to have a pretty big selection. (I don't actually eat anything with legs so I can't comment on whether the meat stuff is nice, but we seem to have lots of different sorts!)

On the subject of my job on the D
eli, it's interesting to work for Morrisons as you see how they save money so the can charge you less for your food. The staff have to provide their own trousers/skirts (except on the bakery and in the warehouse where they wear special white overalls), and the checkout girls have to wear catsick coloured tabards as their uniforms obviously haven't been updated since about 1981 when catsick was THE colour to be seen in. Also the students were paid about 30p an hour less than people of the same age doing exactly the same job (fair?! I think not). The customers are on the whole nice, the little old ladies were always terribly sorry to have bothered us when they only wanted one slice of ham, obviously the point of beeing able to choose how much you want is so you get how much you want, so we'd always be saying "no, really it's okay! You can have one slice if you want, it's no problem at all, really!" and they'd be saying "sorry to be a nusiance, dear" which is kind of sweet!! And about 95% of the customers are okay, they told you what they wanted and said please and thank you and spoke to you like you were a human. Of course, there are always a few that assume you're completely stupid and deliberately try to confuse you. Like the woman who marched up to the counter and demanded to know how much the grated cheese was, and when I told her said "are you sure?" so I showed her the price ticket in the counter and she said "are you sure?" to the point where I was beginning to question my own ability to read 3 numbers. There was also the man who demanded "10 mil" of topside. It transpired he wanted a pile of topside 10 millimetres thick, but he loved every minute of the girl who was serving him's confusion. Okay, maybe we were all completely stupid but nobody was familiar with that particular method of selling beef. And the man who comes in every week at Kirkstall and argues with us about the wei
ght of the curries, saying it keeps going down. Now, it's been 355g since October 2000 when I started but he keeps insisting it's 365g and will quite often change his mind after you've packed it for him.

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining about serving people, and I didn't mind waiting while people made up their minds or sampled different cheeses before making up their minds and the majority of customers are fine, but people who just assume that you're brain-dead and they have the right to treat you like poo because you work in a shop are annoying!!

Ah, little winge over! The savings scheme, Morrisons Miles, is pretty good if you drive and buy your petrol from there. You get a plastic card and for every complete litre of petrol you buy, you get 15 points. When you reach 5000 points, you get a £5 voucher to spend in the store, the only exclusions being lottery tickets, stamps and mobile phone top-up cards. It does take quite a while to reach 5000 points, (unless you're a taxi driver of do a lot of driving I suppose) I've had my card since July 2001 and I finally got a voucher in about November, I've got about 2000and something at the moment! They did have a special offer of double points a while ago in the Crewe store which helped, I don't know if they plan to do that often and if they do it in every store at the same time. The petrol is always good value too, 68.9 (unleaded) at the Kirkstall store on Saturday, the lowest I've seen petrol here in Leeds. And because you get points per litre rather than per pound, you don't lose out by it being cheap!

Morrisons in Kirkstall and Crewe offer everything you need in a supermarket, at very reasonable prices!!

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