Tesco Savings DDs

CheshireHenry

My first post. Got a few points to make, so it's fairly long.

Tesco's Reasons.

There is a Tesco forum (I can't link to it being a new user) where we are told that the decision to withdraw direct debits "is entirely a commercial decision and is due to an internal process change".

The letter I received said it was "...to bring account functionality in line with other savings accounts on the market". Hardly an internal process change then?

My letter also says it's "in order to keep your account as secure as possible". So after years of the industry promoting DDs Tesco are removing them because they are not "as secure as possible"?

A Pattern Emerging?

My wife noted the following:
Tesco had a good product with the hudl tablet - discontinued.
They had a good in-store optician - sold to Vision Express.
They had a good pharmacy, which seems to have been "reorganised" in our local store.
They had a useful savings account...you see where I'm going?

Alternatives

I have had a PO Internet Saver for sometime and it's been reliable. Only issue is that transactions take a few days to go through. Incidentally it's run by the Bank of Ireland who take regulatory compliance to almost farcical levels. If there was a rule about finishing DDs on savings accounts, they would have acted on it.

I shall have a look at Ecology BS regular saver or the Scottish Widow's Instant Saver 2.

fun4everyone

They dropped the DD facility because it was costing more money than it was worth to them.

msallen

CheshireHenry wrote: »

My wife noted the following:
Tesco had a good product with the hudl tablet - discontinued.

I bought one (for my aged mother to use for skype, and nothing else) and ended up taking it back as it was useless.

They had a good in-store optician - sold to Vision Express.

I used them once and swore I'd never return due to the quality of the frames

They had a good pharmacy, which seems to have been "reorganised" in our local store.

No expereince

They had a useful savings account...you see where I'm going?

Yes. Right along with your wife's strange conspiracy theory.

eskbanker

CheshireHenry wrote: »

A Pattern Emerging?

My wife noted the following:
Tesco had a good product with the hudl tablet - discontinued.
They had a good in-store optician - sold to Vision Express.
They had a good pharmacy, which seems to have been "reorganised" in our local store.
They had a useful savings account...you see where I'm going?

It would appear that where you're going is trying to make a tenuous case that minor changes to Tesco's offerings are part of some coordinated plan to irritate their customers.

Hudl was a small-scale experiment that was dropped as soon as they realised that it was never going to establish enough market share to be viable in the face of serious players like Apple and Google.

The optician selloff was part of their strategy of focusing on core business after some of their overdiversification was felt to have contributed to poor core business performance, hence also offloading Dobbies garden centres, Harris & Hoole cafes, etc, and reining back some of their overseas expansions.

No idea what your point is about the pharmacy, but clearly any business has to review what's working and what isn't, and take actions accordingly, to avoid following in the footsteps of the many who weren't decisive enough (Woolworths, Comet, Toys'R'Us, etc, etc).

If one felt inclined to do so, it could be pointed out that they didn't have a bank at all until relatively recent times (the RBS joint venture being spun off in 2008) for a business celebrating its centenary next year, so some of their changes have clearly worked well enough to be retained....

bettz

Just received my letter today about DD's.

It's going to affect my Halifax accounts and my Tesco account (Looks like i've no DD's set up on my tesco account but still get 3%)

I've a tsb account so hopefully I can set a DD up with them but what else is everyone using?

eskbanker

bettz wrote: »

Just received my letter today about DD's.

It's going to affect my Halifax accounts and my Tesco account

I've a tab account so hopefully I can set a DD up with them but what else is everyone using?

Everyone else is using this thread to read up on (and debate) the alternatives....

CheshireHenry

eskbanker wrote: »

It would appear that where you're going is trying to make a tenuous case that minor changes to Tesco's offerings are part of some coordinated plan to irritate their customers.

I had obviously had a lot more success with these services than msallen. The withdrawal of these 'minor' services together with the poor stock levels in their 'core' grocery section of the local store means that I have no reason to go in and now shop elsewhere.

eskbanker wrote: »

No idea what your point is about the pharmacy,

My humour mustn't have come acrossl. I should have said that the local pharmacy was transformed from being reliable with caring staff to not being able to fulfill prescriptions with staff who didn't care.

I really don't want to take the discussion any further off topic. Suffice to say that at least one reader noticed there were some serious comments in my post.

David_Partington

Why doesn't everyone on this forum complain by telephone to Tesco about this, in my book they have no right to cancel dds set up by customers

KTF

David_Partington wrote: »

Why doesn't everyone on this forum complain by telephone to Tesco about this, in my book they have no right to cancel dds set up by customers

Why do they have no right to do this?

David_Partington

The first notification I saw was a letter last week, I haven't got time to read through their rule change booklets