Reply With QuoteBit by bit they are losing everything that sets them apart from the competition. Shame I used to like the shopsOriginally Posted by hogthrob
... until Monday 22nd August, when the scheme ends. It's the end of an era.
https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/ne...nowingly-unde/
Bit by bit they are losing everything that sets them apart from the competition. Shame I used to like the shops
It won't make much of a difference. No single uk retailer has the power to set prices.
They all follow each other and the loss of never knowingly undersold won't stop jl being a price taker.
I the age of internet shopping and price checking it has had its day.
Mark my words: Pippa Lewis is going to drive it into the ground then walk away with a fat severance payment.
Who? Thought the Chair was Sharon White
Maybe they could have a never knowingly made in China pledge instead.
I worked for a company who used to import a load of almost fully assembled junk from China, finish it off and check its quality here in the UK and John Lewis sold it to UK customers as Made in the UK and charged ALOT for it.
It was designed in the UK but it was very much Chinese made and even tested in China ( metals content in paint and that sort of thing if i remember ) We even had an interpreter between us and the Chinese factory bosses.
Mothercare and several other businesses would do the same.
Maybe things have changed now, this was back in the mid 2000`s.
Same as Waitrose they scrapped the free coffees ages ago and recently scrapped the free paper if you spent more than £10
Sorry typo: Current Exec Director is Pippa Wicks
There’s a British manufactured white goods supplier that just assembles French made components into a British flagged product in the north east
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Agreed - the stupidity was we used to buy from them due to the additional warranty and the assumption via their guarantee the price would be good.
I wonder how many price matches they actually had to do in the end ?
Customer service always used to be "no quibble" but I am not so sure about that either now.
Their credit card has deteriorated significantly too. Used to be 1% cashback from JL/Waitrose purchases I think but is now less than 0.5% from earlier this year.
Last edited by Gruntfuttock; 17th August 2022 at 17:59. Reason: typo
In the online age, they were never going to be able to continue to both be "never knowingly undersold" and provide the highest possible customer service.
That particular space has been completely overtaken by Amazon, who can benefit from the economies of scale of being orders of magnitude larger than John Lewis.
I never understood what it meant. So, meh.
From my recent experience of John Lewis they need to change their tag line to
'Never knowingly give a toss about their customers'
We purchased a Samsung fridge freezer from them less than a year ago and it recently failed. We lost a lot of the contents and when we contacted them they told us to take it up with Samsung. It was clear they weren't interested.
Samsung engineers 'fixed' the unit only for it to fail again a few weeks later when we were abroad.
John Lewis were again totally disinterested and again tried to fob us off to Samsung.
When we explained we wanted a refund and expected compensation for the losses the customer services representative said they would only repair the unit, unless we obtained an independent engineers report, in which case they'd only refund a percentage of the amount paid.
The loss of food/time etc because they'd failed to provide goods fit for purpose was apparently just tough luck.
Their attitude was phenomenally bad, I can't think they could have been any more obstructive and difficult to deal with if they'd tried.
We have since got advice from Citizens Advice and have sent correspondence to John Lewis reminding them about our entitlements under the customer rights act 2015, to only having to accept one repair and compensation for our loss but as of yet they've not responded.
Buyers beware.
Last edited by Spike; 17th August 2022 at 20:00.
I used to work with a guy whose other job was at a company that produced Made in England labels for several U.K. stores including M&S, they would get their blouses/shirts etc made in Turkey without buttons or labels, ship them to the U.K. where a sweatshop would add the buttons and the Made in U.K. labels.
This had been their main business since the 50’s, and they only stopped when the boss/owner retired.
Wouldn’t that be fraud? Of course I believe you, just quite surprised that one could add a Made in UK label without that being true?
1/ The consequential loss is not John Lewis's problem.
2/ It is perfectly normal & legal for a reailer to refer a customer to a manufacturer for repair. The retailer aren't shirking their responsibility, they are merely getting the manufacturer to act on their behalf. If the reatailer repaired the goods, they'd have to employ their own repair staff and pass the bill back to the manufacturer anyway. Getting the manufacturer to do the work makes more sense.
3/ The Samsung guy who visited you was a repairman. Not an engineer.
4/ You're correct about the CRA and rejecting the goods. I hope you've made it clear that you're rejecting & asked them to collect. You may be entitled to damages for non performance, long shot but no harm in asking.
5/ Piss poor if JLP are ignoring you, although you don't say how long you've been waiting for an answer. Try a letter before action.
1) correct: home insurance issue (regardless of the age of the failed appliance
2) yes and no: whilst it will be down to the manufacturer to intervene, JL should have been the one contacting them. It’s called customer service.
'Against stupidity, the gods themselves struggle in vain' - Schiller.
Engineer -
1. a person who designs, builds, or maintains engines, machines, or structures.
You can call a submarine an aeroplane…………. It doesn’t mean it will fly.
I think - is the point being made.
There are defined limits to how much of the finished product has include to be sold as 'Made in UK'. But, some clever people will have made sure that the bare minimum is UK-sourced/supplied- to slip under the threshold.
Not a dictionary definition though.
A plane, however, can dive beneath the sea.
Once.
'Against stupidity, the gods themselves struggle in vain' - Schiller.
My memory might be failing me but didn’t JLP order white goods from suppliers with a JLP specific model number, therefore when the “never knowingly undersold” issue reared its head they could point out it was not the same model and therefore claim the price difference was irrelevant?
I remember being dragged to Peter Jones in Sloane Square as a child each summer holiday for school uniform fitting… dark days…
The regular Waitrose shop is also something I dread to this day!
Last edited by Sinnlover; 18th August 2022 at 08:40.
All the big retailers (Argos, Curries, Dixons, Comet etc) did that. They had a very slight difference in trim/drawers etc (of no actual consequence) which allowed them to claim that there were no 'comparable' models.
Reminds me of a guy I used to work with.
He was a self-important, arrogant git who always described himself as a 'software engineer' even though he just wrote commercial code, same as the rest of us.
He would often say "Yes, but I'm a software engineer, the rest of you are just coders"...
From experience this appeared to mean he wrote overly complicated, undocumented code.
M
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Breitling Cosmonaute 809 - What's not to like?
Just to add some balance to this thread, 'never knowingly undersold' has always worked well for us.
Purchased a table and chairs, went back the following week for something else and noticed the price had dropped, we asked and they immediately refunded the difference (£250) without any argument.
Purchased a laptop as it came with a JL 2 year warranty rather than one year provided by the manufacturer, laptop had issues when 18 months old, JL arranged for collection repair and return and its still working, repair costs were almost the same as a new laptop. Various other examples where the JL never knowingly undersold philosophy has been honoured which I won't bore you with. I will be disappointed to see its demise along with the general lowering of standards required to compete in todays market.
Ah! So you’re saying that you can use the ‘Made in UK’ label as soon as a certain proportion of the product is UK made, even though parts are made abroad - am I getting this right?
If so, wouldn’t it still be wrong to claim something is ‘UK made’ if only a small fraction of it actually is made here?
Is 'UK made' like 'Swiss made'?
Yes. EU see it as an issue with a lot of UK-‘made’ goods, and have also set thresholds.
I’m not sure what uk and eu thresholds are, though.
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There have been endless threads about what Swiss Made means on a watch. I’m astonished this isn’t common knowledge tbh. Nothing is as it seems.
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I understood that as the buttons were added in the U.K. it allowed the garment to meet the criteria in place at the time.
That pretty well mirrors my feelings. I used them for years but today absolutely no way. It's just a sad example of internet shopping doing its inevitable damage.
We stopped using John Lewis for white goods after our Samsung FF debacle.
Previously we had purchased a dishwasher with extended warranty from John Lewis, after 4 years this failed and was replaced under warranty, this happened 3 times until the last one died just out of warranty
With our FF we ordered with John Lewis and paid for delivery and door switching (right opening to left opening). John Lewis’s delivery team damaged the first FF , so it was replaced with a second one, which didn’t work properly, Samsung’s engineer came out and found the whole thing was warped due to being damaged in delivery. John Lewis replaced it with a 3rd, which was dented during delivery (the same team on each occasion) At this point we told John Lewis to ‘do one’ and get a refund, in the end, as the dent wasn’t on the front of the doors we settled for 50% discount !
All the white goods stayed with the flat when we sold in 2018, so I really hope they screwed up and left the new owner (who screwed us about big time during the sale) to deal with John Lewis CS.
Didn’t know that re Made in UK. Should be common knowledge for sure. As you say nothin is as it seems.
Great place to get cheap Seiko watches with their price match guarantee
Careful, Blue Phil will be on your case
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Citizens Advice take was that claiming for consequential losses from JL was acceptable.
I'd agree the term repairman would be more accurate, although in our case maybe not.
What was so frustrating and quite surprising was JL's total lack of customer care and the fact that they tried to mislead us about our customer rights/entitlements.
To conclude we have now received responses from both Samsung and JL, both a refund for the fridge freezer and compensation for our losses/inconvenience have been agreed.
Based on our experience I can't imagine buying anything similar from JL.
What was impressive was the response and advice provided by Citizens Advice.
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