I went to Marks and Spencer yesterday for a spot of lunch and bought this Deli antipasti stuff:
Most of it was OK but the olives were really weird and I felt the need to complain to M&S customer services but I couldn’t find an email for them so instead wrote to Mr Marc Boland, Chief Executive, as he was probably on the ball with this kind of stuff.
marc.bolland@marks-and-spencer.com
Subject: Bitter olives
Dear Marc
I was in one of your shops in Glasgow and I bought a packet of antipasti olives and they were really bitter and I was all like “by Mark’s and Spencer’s unusually high standards, these olives are very poor”. So I thought that you, being Chief Executive, would like to hear about my experience.
When I went back to the office, I wasn’t sure if it was just me being all hyper sensitive because I’m a world class food blogger, so I gave one to my boss, Dave, who’s face contorted into a painful mass of anger, fear, confusion and revulsion. I asked if I could take a picture so you could see just how bitter the olives were but he wouldn’t let me.
Instead I got him to draw a picture of himself being all repulsed by the olive menace:
“I haven’t tasted anything this bitter since Paul Gascoine scored that jammy goal against us at Wembley”
I think this is a very important matter to draw to your attention; as a loyal customer of the salad bar section I admire your impeccable attention to detail and fine taste in dressings (not dresses, oh Mark! haha, lol)
Any feedback in this matter and a refund of the £2 I paid for the item would be great.
Yours sincerely
myfoodee blog
Another goddam foodblog 
If you go to the customer service desk and compliant they will give you a refund.
I might do that, but maybe bringing it to the attention of Mark might get me 2 packets in return?
I once had a selection of asda prawns filled with roe and complained and they gave me £10. I spent it on fish roe.
hahahaaa
We don’t have Marks and Spencer. We do have a kind of similar thing called Thomas Dux which is a posh-type supermarket, so a bit like M&S only without underwear. I generally don’t return things because I’m a bit weird about salespeople because I get this sense that if they go to the trouble of scanning an item and all, I am sort of obliged to like it. I think it’s because my ego is damaged by being a youngest child. I did once attempt to return a packet of cornflakes to Coles because when I opened it, the waxed bag didn’t have a bunch of flakes but instead one big massive mutant corn thing with all the flakes stuck together, and I thought it was a step over the line of tolerable breakfast foods. But the complaints and returns queue is the same as the cigarette queue so pretty long. And then the woman in front got into a seriously long debate with the shop guy because they wouldn’t sell her a prepaid mobile phone because she didn’t have a drivers licence with photo ID which the guy said ‘that’s the rules’ which she got seriously pissed off because she had a passport and shop guy said it didn’t count. I was decidedly on her side, but the queue of cigarette buyers had already weighed in by this point and a 16yo manager got called in the fray. This was now over 40 minutes of my valuable life so I amended my plan and instead took my massive mutant corn flake home so I could invite people over to look at it and then watch DVDs.
what i would have done