PICK 'N PAY STORE MANAGEMENT FAIL TO USE THEIR DISCRETION

My sister and I went to Pick 'n Pay Strubenvale at Springs in Ekurhuleni on Tuesday 03/11/2020 to purchase their 'Vegetable Combo'. The combo gives an option of choosing 4 vegetable bags/packs of your choice for R100 and at times you can take 2 types of the same vegetables. We got to the rack and found that there were only three options to choose from 3kg Onions, 3Kg Carrots and 2kg Potatoes, the rest were out of stock. There was also a notice which stipulated that customers were only allowed one pack of 2kg potatoes; which we understood seeing that there is a shortage in the country.

We felt that buying 6kg of either onions or carrots would not make purchasing sense as the vegetables would go off overtime. So we made a request to management to make an exception seeing that everything else was out of stock and allow us to add a second pack of 2kg potatoes to the combo. The two mangers (we didn't get their names) we approached blatantly refused and told us that they unfortunately would not be able to make a concession as their systems would not be able to process a transaction for an additional pack of potatoes. We then asked if they could not over-ride the system to allow the transaction and we were told that they could not. We then made a suggestion seeing that their systems cannot be over-ridden if they can not then process the transaction; make a credit note or any note that would be used to off-set the purchase with at later stage or whenever they have stock. We were then told that there was no item in the store they could use to balance the purchase with.

In all the years of being a consumer at retail stores, we have never heard of systems that cannot be over-ridden and we stand to be corrected. Furthermore and even worse, we have never heard of a retail store as big as Pick 'n Pay that has no items in the store to balance or off-set other items against.

What we felt happened is we had two managers/supervisors who just simply refused to assist us for reasons only known to them. We also had 2 managers/supervisors who could not use their "managerial discretion" to make our shopping experience convenient; showing very poor leadership. Instead we were told "sorry that's COVID-19"

We have been supporting the Pick 'n Pay store in question for a solid two years and after the thousands of Rands we have spent over the years we found it quite disconcerting that a R25 reasonable concession could not be made by management.

We are highly disappointed that in this day and age Pick 'n Pay has systems that cannot be over-ridden, items that cannot be off-set against and management that cannot use their discretion. We are extremely disgruntled at how this matter was handled and implore Pick 'n Pay Head office to look into this.

We look forward to your response.