More great publicity for Morrisons

bazster

Morrisons ****s with the wrong [STRIKE]marine[/STRIKE] airman.

vision2009

It's about time Morrisons outed this company and their tactics, don't they realise it's damaging their business.They use them at Morrisons in our town too.
What reputable business would inflict this on their customers?
They deserve to lose customers until this is resolved.

Umkomaas

While a PPC will have some immediate impact on rogue parkers, beyond that it will be people legitimately using the car parking facility who become the target group.

I would bet Morrisons have lost ten times the number of customers compared with the number of rogue parkers 'foiled' by the great sky camera. I suspect there's some Head Office jobsworth, responsible for negotiating the PE contract, feeling it's a price worth paying!

Fight_the_good_fight

I wonder if someone could educate the paper in that it's not a fine,they use the F word twice

The_Deep

Fight_the_good_fight wrote: »

I wonder if someone could educate the paper in that it's not a fine,they use the F word twice

I should not worry too much about it, the average punter who reads the article connects far more easily with the word "fine" than "unsolicited invoice".

Half_way

The_Deep wrote: »

I should not worry too much about it, the average punter who reads the article connects far more easily with the word "fine" than "unsolicited invoice".

while the average punter understands the word fine, using this term does give the whole scam an appearance of legitimacy.
Prefixing the F word with the word unlawful, illegal, or illegitimate ( or any other such word) would be far more emotive and at the same time this would be far more accurate than just the word fine on its own.

hoohoo

Umkomaas wrote: »

While a PPC will have some immediate impact on rogue parkers, beyond that it will be people legitimately using the car parking facility who become the target group.

I would bet Morrisons have lost ten times the number of customers compared with the number of rogue parkers 'foiled' by the great sky camera. I suspect there's some Head Office jobsworth, responsible for negotiating the PE contract, feeling it's a price worth paying!

ParkingEye's own data in PE v Somerfield shows the rogue parkers account for at most 33% of overstays and are gone within 6 weeks. After that, the remaining 66% consist of predominantly genuine customers overstaying, so PE have to gouge their client's customers in order to survive. As PE v Somerfield also shows, once the genuine customers wise up and move elsewhere or stop overstaying, then PE have to lower stay times to get enough overstayers.

Their figures are based on 0.4 tickets issued per parking spaces per week, down from 0.6 tickets issued when they commence operations.

bazster

Umkomaas wrote: »

While a PPC will have some immediate impact on rogue parkers, beyond that it will be people legitimately using the car parking facility who become the target group.

I would bet Morrisons have lost ten times the number of customers compared with the number of rogue parkers 'foiled' by the great sky camera. I suspect there's some Head Office jobsworth, responsible for negotiating the PE contract, feeling it's a price worth paying!

It seems that the Birmingham Mail has a readership of 95,000. A handful of those will now be ex-Morrisons customers as a result of reading this article. Not a huge number - but nonetheless it'll cost Morrisons more than they might've gained from people vacating car park spaces sooner that they might otherwise have done.

My local Morrisons is huge, and has a restaurant, a petrol station, a newsstand, a chemist and various other outlets extra to the main grocery shopping section. What's more, if you want to place a special order you have to queue at the CS desk to do so, and a mate of mine who isn't boycotting them yet (despite me urging him to do so) stood there for 40 minutes to order his Christmas Day meat.

You can easily see how genuine customers could go over PE's arbitrary limit simply by using the facilities on offer and spending money at them.

It's utter, utter madness and if Dalton Philips thinks this is the kind of thing that will stop his company going down the pan he's in for a big disappointment. My boycotting them alone has cost them many hundreds of pounds already.

Fergie76

But on December 4, nearing two years later, the pensioners were sent a threatening letter once again from Parking Eye who demanded they pay up or go to court.

I think holding information for this long, without acting on it should be a breach of the DPA. The DPA does not give a time scale on how long data should be kept:

In brief – what does the Data Protection Act say about keeping personal data?

The Act does not set out any specific minimum or maximum periods for retaining personal data. Instead, it says that:
Personal data processed for any purpose or purposes shall not be kept for longer than is necessary for that purpose or those purposes.
This is the fifth data protection principle. In practice, it means that you will need to:

• review the length of time you keep personal data;
• consider the purpose or purposes you hold the information for in deciding whether (and for how long) to retain it;
• securely delete information that is no longer needed for this purpose or these purposes; and
• update, archive or securely delete information if it goes out of date.

and you could argue 6 years as that is how long they have to bring a claim, but if they are not acting on the information the hold, they should delete it after 6 months to a year.

Guys_Dad

The pensioner in question has the every right to be aggrieved and should not be charged any money whatsoever.

However, I do regret that the story was hijacked by the fact that some 60 years ago, along with millions of others, including my father, he fought in the 2nd world war. This makes it appear that he should be let off because he was a war hero some lifetime ago rather than as an elderly shopper who spent money at the supermarket where he was being charged for overstaying at the car park.

A bit like X-Factor where the performers should be judged by their performance and not by the peripheral sob-stories that accompany the performance, Mr Donald's case was sufficiently strong (and Morrrison's handling of the initial agreement to drop the charge) as to make the fact that he was a decorated war hero irrelevant.

bazster

On the contrary I think it highlights the totally indiscriminate nature of what Morrisons/ParkingEye are doing. Old, young, rich, poor, deserving, undeserving, robust, vulnerable, Morrisons don't ask and don't care.