Yesterday evening I needed to call Tesco in a hurry about an Online Grocery order that I was possibly not going to be able to at home for when it arrived. I was only able to call from a mobile (Tesco as it so happens) phone and the call was urgent as I had to decide whether or not I could cancel the delivery rather than make a 2 hour drive home to be there in time.
On the main web page for Tesco Online Grocery shopping at
http://www.tesco.com/groceries/ the only phone number listed at the bottom of the page is 0800 323 4040. I was concerned that even though I have a contract mobile with 750 minutes of calls that the conniving mobile bandits might find a way to not let me use these minutes to a free 0800 number. This is even though these minutes include all normally payable 01/02/03 numbers. I do understand that calls to 0800 numbers on mobiles are not currently free.
I therefore visted this website's (
www.saynoto0870.com) home page at
www.saynoto0870.com and entered the Tesco Grocery number of 0800 323 4040 in the Search To Find Alternative Number box. On doing so the only single
Verified entry returned was for "Tesco.com" and showed both the 0800 number I had entered and an 0845 alternative. There was no listing at all of either an 01/02 or an 03 geographic number that I could be sure was in my call package.
In a hurry and desperation I called this 0800 number and discovered if I was not at home Tesco simply took my shopping back to base and did not charge me for either the goods or the delivery fee. Their only comment was one should not do this too often or Tesco might refuse to make future grocery deliveries.
Today I had more time to think about the call charges and so checked my Tesco Mobile online account only to find to my horror I had incurred charged of £0.17 and £1.32 for calls that were respectively 50 and 396 seconds long to the 0800 number. This suggests a 20p per minute call rate for calling 0800 numbers on my call package compared to approximately 1p per minute for the bundled 750 inclusive landline/mobile minutes (if we assume 1p per minute for those calls and £2.50 per Gb in my 2Gb monthly data allowance). I found this totally unacceptable given that when I called the 0800 number with Tesco Mobile there was only a warning that the call was not free and that I needed to recall it removing the initial zero. There was no warning at all that 0800 calls were not even covered by my call bundle for chargeable calls.
I rang Tesco customers services and told them I thought it was despicable to charge for calls to 0800 at 20p per minute when these were cheaper than 01/02/03 to call (i.e. always free) on a landline and therefore surely also cheaper for Tesco Mobile to originate as the called party paid for a part of the call. I asked not that the 0800 calls be free but only that they be covered by my 750 inlclusive minutes. Grudgingly they agree to refund the charge on the basis of the misleading announcement about pricing not mentioning that 0800 calls were excluded from call bundles and me never having called an 0800 number with them before.
However on visiting the Tesco Contact Us page at
www.tesco.com/help/contact/ just now I discover that they do actually have an 03 alternative number there for the 0800 number for Tesco Groceries of
0330 123 4040Can I therefore please request as a matter of urgency that the Verified entry on this site for Tesco.Com is updated to include the 0330 123 4040 number that will be covered by any inclusive calls package on a landline or a mobile. The current entry is very unhelpful to mobile users by encouraging them to call either an 0800 or an 0845 number when neither of these numbers is likely to covered by a mobile phone inclusive minutes calling package.