After many days of back and forth between myself, Coles supermarket and Coles credit cards a long saga of missing groceries followed by missing refund money has been concluded. I have now closed my Coles credit card and once I have spent my credit at Coles supermarket fully intend to never spend another cent in their stores ever again. Which is a dramatic change given they have been the supermarket I have gone to almost exclusively for decades.

I can say I’ve never experienced such terrible customer service before, beating even the OPSM debacle of 2009. The groceries were delivered to the wrong address. A full refund was eventually promised (but nothing ever communicated to me, I always had to follow them up through this whole saga to get any information). The refund was eventually processed a few days later, but never showed at the bank. The supermarket claimed they sent it and it was declined, the bank agreed it had been declined but couldn’t say why. The supermarket refused to do anything else, both the bank and supermarket said it was the other’s responsibility. Within the bank customer service said it was the security centre’s responsibility, the security centre said it was nothing to do with them and to contact customer service.

Throughout all of this online chat communication was only available intermittently. The app directed me to send a text message, which received an auto reply with the store opening hours. Via email I was just told there was nothing they could do and I had to follow it up with the bank. I was eventually able to speak to someone on the phone and argued enough to get them to process a credit to my account so at least I haven’t completely lost the money, even if I would have preferred the cash back. As a downside it looks like I have to spend the whole lot in one transaction online which is a bit annoying, but once that is spent I can happily never go to Coles again. I think I’ll do click and collect instead of delivery for this one though.