Pets at Home & Wainwrights

artbaron

If you're not interested in dog food or rather dull accounts of pet-related frustration then look away now...

Damn, what a painful process. Whilst trying different dog foods I chanced upon Wainwrights', which is Pets At Home's own brand and is really good and not too expensive (although more expensive than you'd imagine, as I'll come to later). It certainly suits my dog so I decided to quit his old stuff and feed him Wainwright's.

If only it were that simple. With his old stuff I used to go to Amazon, click on Order and three days later I have as much food as I want delivered, for free. It took literally 30 seconds. With Wainwrights' you can only order it from their site and in very limited quantities and it takes longer than 30 seconds... a lot longer.

So, I choose a couple of products and try to order two dozen of each. Not possible. First, although it says delivery is available, as soon I enter my postcode (which is hardly in the middle of nowhere) that option disappears.

So it's collect in-store, a 40 mile round-trip. Except it's not, because you can only order a few trays at a time, a week's worth if you're lucky. It doesn't tell you this but by retyping ever reducing quantities the collect in-store icon eventually turns from a cross to a tick. I guess telling you how many you can order rather than having you guess is asking too much.

I rang P@H and they said there is a supply problem. This has been going on a for a month now but nobody can tell me how serious the problem is, when it might end or when the best time to order is.

So I order my paltry few trays and try to pay but their website goes mental and deletes my basket. So I try again and this time I get half-way through payment before the site throws up an error and I'm left with an incomplete order and no hints on how to rectify the situation. So I ring up their support line - again - and the lady on the other end does something and tells me my order is now finalised and I'll get an email and text for order confirmation plus a second email and text when the items are ready for collection, the next morning.

I get a confirmation email which leads to a page saying 404-Error Page not found. No text.

The day after I wait for a text or email and... nothing. So after lunch I ring the store and I'm told that the delivery has arrived and is ready for collection. I go to pick it up and it's there but they can't find it on 'the system'. The girl at the tills calls a colleague and we wait; the colleague turns up and we wait some more whilst he tries and fails to find it, then the same procedure is repeated with a manager and then, finally, something magical is done and the package is eventually mine. This identical procedure is repeated every time I turn up, sometimes with the same people being involved.

Now I've got my dog food there's another problem that I previously suspected but have only just confirmed. These trays are labelled as 395g but in actual fact most weigh significantly less. I've weighed the contents of five of them on an accurate scale and the results are 371g, 373g, 381g, 385g and 401g. That's an average of 382g, quite some way from the 395g stated.

So good as Wainwright's is as a dog food, life's too short to be going through that charade once a week only to be short-changed at the end of the day. I've ordered some Forthglade from Amazon so we'll see how that goes.

Dr._Shoe

Why don't you just phone up the store and ask them to put some aside for you and go down and collect it?

The weight is an average but as the Tesco beans scandal of the 1990s proved they save money by making most cans underweight and just a few cans over.

artbaron

Dr._Shoe wrote: »

Why don't you just phone up the store and ask them to put some aside for you and go down and collect it?

I tried that a couple of weeks ago. They said they had none in store but would have some coming in. I asked when and they said they didn't know, nor did they know how much.

timbstoke

artbaron wrote: »

life's too short to be going through that charade once a week only to be short-changed at the end of the day. I've ordered some Forthglade from Amazon so we'll see how that goes.

I think I'd have reached that conclusion as soon as I found out I could only collect in store.

pawsies

Berriewoods do their own range now which are very similar.

You have to buy 7 cases to get the £7.92 price but that sounds like it suits you anyway

http://www.berriewoodwholesale.co.uk/det/7480/Berriewood-Complete-Menu-Tray-Multi-7-Case-Deal-7x10x395g-10-EXTRA-FREE/

artbaron

pawsies wrote: »

Berriewoods do their own range now which are very similar.

You have to buy 7 cases to get the £7.92 price but that sounds like it suits you anyway

http://www.berriewoodwholesale.co.uk/det/7480/Berriewood-Complete-Menu-Tray-Multi-7-Case-Deal-7x10x395g-10-EXTRA-FREE/

Thanks, I'll look into that.

Good site too.

marmitepotato

I agree with Pawsies, Berriewood are fantastic. I feed my boxers Skinners Duck and Rice. Ordered two bags Wednesday afternoon and they arrived (free delivery) Thursday morning. Faultless service.

SuperHan

See here for allowable weight discrepancies and see if it's worth a complaint, , assuming the weight is marked as estimated :


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_sign

artbaron

Well, I'm about to order from Berriewood so we'll see how that suits my boy.

I've had it with Pets at Home, they've got even worse since my last posts. Now they don't deliver to my post code at all and it's impossible to order in more than three days' supply to the store, which I'd have to collect on a 40 mile round trip. I did manage to order a ten days' supply not long ago (for which their terrible payment system charged me twice). I sent a polite email several days ago asking when this supply problem will be resolved, if that's what it is, and they couldn't be bothered to reply.

So stuff you, Pets at Home, you've lost a customer.

[Deleted User]

artbaron - Have you ever tried shopping with Pets Corner instead? Not sure where you are based but there may be one in your local area!

artbaron

BirdNerdSophie wrote: »

artbaron - Have you ever tried shopping with Pets Corner instead? Not sure where you are based but there may be one in your local area!

Cheers, but Pets at Home is the only retailer to sell Wainwright's (not that they can manage that very well), it's exclusive to them. My dog has mild colitis and Wainwright's Grain Free is brilliant for him, the only food that 100% agrees with him. If it weren't for that I wouldn't bother with P@H.

Forthglade Natural Lifestage is one option - it's available from various websites and is the same recipe as Wainwright's except that it contains brown rice, which can be a little harsh for my boy.