Ocado customers fume as pureplay offers Smart Pass refunds

Ocado says that it has made it easier for customers to claim a Smart Pass refund during the coronavirus outbreak.

“If you paid £5.99 or more for a Smart Pass in March and only had one delivery (or none at all) due to the unprecedented demand, we want to make it up to you by refunding last month’s Smart Pass fee,” the pureplay tweeted yesterday.

Customers will need to fill in an online form, or Ocado will donate the fee to food bank charities on their behalf. There is also an option to cancel the Smart Pass.

The aforementioned tweet received a less than positive response, with one customer commenting: “Ocado seems to be making a mess of this pandemic. I thought the purpose of online business was being able to scale. To me it seems compared to traditional supermarkets Ocado failed miserably at scaling up its operations. Haven't been able to get deliveries for the past 4 weeks…”

Another fumed: “What a joke, should be the same for everyone. What's made it worse is that all the offers got pulled and made the shopping as expensive as buying at Waitrose/M&S. Shafted everyone. We aren't vulnerable but neither of us can drive so rely on you. You failed us.”

“I’d just like a chance at a delivery. I’m sorry but you are the worst,” said another person.

Under pressure

As the coronavirus intensified, Ocado last month published an open letter to its customers, entitled ‘What a pickle’.

Around the same time, its Chairman, Stuart Rose, called on Brits to stop stockpiling groceries.

Speaking on Radio 4’s Today programme, he said: “There is no shortage of food. Nobody will starve. There is a £1 billion more food in people’s larders than there was a couple of weeks ago. What are they doing with it? How much do you need to eat? How much do you need to store away?”

CEO Melanie Smith, meanwhile, commented: “We currently have 10 times more demand for our services now than we did before the outbreak began, and with every announcement, we see a further extraordinary surge of customers to Ocado.com. No matter how hard we work, we will not have enough capacity to serve the unprecedented levels of demand.”