I WANT TO SHOW YOU SOMETHING...

I want to show you something. I'm sick of feeling like one of the few people who give a shit. I have now quit my job as Team Leader to the home shopping department of Morrisons because I could not continue to play a part in this disgusting operation.

Below, are a series of pictures I have taken over the past few weeks. When the Morrisons Yeovil home delivery department went live (in April) we were – to begin with – set up temporarily in the café at the front of the store. Despite a chaotic start, we began to get a handle on things, despite failing to get a handle on general cleanliness and tidiness.

About a month or so ago, we were moved out of the café so that it might re-open to the public, and as a consequence, the home delivery department was located to a shipping container in the Goods-In yard at the back of the store. This has proven to be an awful set-up for the following reasons:

1. Pickers with fully loaded ambient trolleys have to push heavy trolleys down a steep ramp, which is coated with a material that becomes very slippery when wet. Even when dry, the ramp is so steep that several members of picking staff struggle to control the weight of the trolley and I see – on a daily basis – pickers dragged by the weight of the trolley as it gathers momentum down the slope. Likewise, drivers have to navigate this same ramp with stacks of chilled and frozen totes for loading on to vans. It is incredibly unsafe, and yet nobody seems to be listening when we raise our concerns. On rainy days, we have no protection from the elements. We all get soaked through. Staff and shopping alike.

2. The shipping container is located in the Goods-In yard, literally less than 10 feet from two large general waste bins. I've seen our home shopping trolleys and stacks of totes crammed up tight against those bins (see photos). Often, the bins are so full of waste that the trap-door style lids cannot shut properly, and the pungent waste within attracts seagulls. These seagulls trample across the surface of the bins, and across the surface of the exposed waste. They swoop down from the surrounding roofs and land upon any waiting ambient trolleys, gathered outside of the shipping container awaiting sequencing (they cannot be stored inside the container because there simply is not room for them). The seagulls peck at the products within the ambient shopping totes, standing on them, plucking out food with their beaks and quickly flying away again. This happens almost without fail every day.

A customer just the other day -- when taking receipt of their home delivery -- noticed mould growing inside one of them. All sorts of leakages have occurred inside those totes... dairy products being common.

Rats have been seen on numerous occasions both within the shipping container, around it, and more crucially INSIDE home delivery totes. The lorries which enter the yard on a regular basis whip up great clouds of dust during the course of their efforts to manoeuvre into position, ready for unloading. Inevitably, the dust settles on the trolleys and the totes because they’re all stored outside the container. These totes are supposed to be cleaned weekly. The home shopping department has now been running for over 14 weeks, and to the best of my knowledge, not **one single tote** has been cleaned – and they definitely haven’t been cleaned since relocating to this shipping container, and they definitely haven't been cleaned with any direct consideration to Covid-19.

3. I worked with people whose standards of cleanliness are quite clearly lacking. You can see from the pictures the kind of thing I'm talking about. Overloading bins, allowing rubbish to gather. Failing to return chilled/frozen put-backs to the chiller/freezer, creating heaps and heaps of waste. I was one of just a few people who cared about regularly cleaning the environment in which we worked, sweeping every time I worked a shift, yet finding that when others were running the department they allowed it all to deteriorate into a rubbish-strewn hell-hole once again. I've seen totes get knocked over on the yard floor, shopping spilled out all over the place, before being shovelled back up, crammed into the totes ready to be given to customers. I sent numerous emails trying to address this problem and yet the problem was never satisfactorily addressed.

Documents containing customers' personal data - which by law we are required to protect and shred - were allowed to just be thrown around the place willy-nilly without any regard to our legal obligations, and I often found these documents blowing around the yard, tangled up with weeds or the fences, left abandoned in vans. Often they were dumped into random boxes on top of which staff lunch wrappers and drinks bottles were dumped. Sometimes, my colleagues even dumped their own rubbish on top of empty bin bags. I have found half-completed documents relating to members of staff who -- when returning from sick leave -- have to undergo a quick interview. These documents are entirely personal to that member of staff. They might contain personal, sensitive information, and yet I've found them rammed into boxes of food waste, in among boxes of removed alcohol tags. I once found a private document concerning the investigation of a member of staff for misconduct just lying around among pens and papers and general odds and ends.

Again... when I mentioned it, nobody really seems to care enough to remedy the situation.

There have also been some frequently occurring problems of a legal nature: members of staff driving delivery vans on public roads while being underage (presumably with respect to Morrisons' insurance requirements - thus potentially meaning uninsured drivers have been out and about in public - and in some cases being involved in minor RTAs). There has been a recent problem with the falsification of certain figures which are designed to increase the appearance of the store's home delivery fulfillment targets, thus leading customers to think they're getting what they're being charged for but in actual fact NOT getting everything they have been charged for. This is done because there are internal consequences for managers if these targets are not hit, and the easy way around it is to fiddle the figures and hope customers don't notice that a few of the items in their shopping aren't exactly the same as what they wanted. The upshot of this is frequently unhappy customers who demand re-deliveries of the actual goods they ordered in the first place, therefore putting further strain on the department the next day. It's a process which operates on a One Step Forward, Two Steps Back basis and it helps no one in the long run. It is also breeding a culture of corner-cutting and -- dare I say it -- dishonesty.

The whole operation is a disgusting, shambolic shit-show -- and I cannot help but wonder, no matter how many times I ask managers or colleagues, what customers would truly think if they knew that their home shopping orders were being assembled and stored in an environment such as this.

So be honest...if your shopping was being put together in this environment, what would you think..?