anon
Speaking as someone wot knows, code checking is a bit of a nightmare. You'd think that it would all be computerised but it's not - someone goes round with a pda and records all the items which need to be reduced the following day, these are then printed out and someone else goes round the next morning and reduces the items.
It is, unfortunately, fairly easy for either person to miss one or two items, particularly if the person who normally does the initial sweep is off sick or on holiday, for example, and some items which have a longer life than other chilled products, like your ham joint, are *sometimes* buttumed to be ok just because they all usually sell well before their bbd-ubd. Customers can, and do, literally throw items to the very back of the shelves if the code isn't long enough for them and even though the item might be found by the code checker it could be hidden later in the day and might be missed by the person reducing, who would buttume that it had been sold. It's not often that the person reducing has time to search through the entire stock for one item.
Having these procedures in place is showing "due diligence", therefore they are an "excuse" in law for mistakes, but staff do work hard to make sure it doesn't happen too often.
As I say, there are already procedures to prevent this happening but sometimes mistakes happen. Four days out of code is unusual but if you think about how many items you've bought which are not out of code then that one item is a very small percentage.
Take the ham back. You should get a free replacement as well as a refund; it was just a mistake. If the customer services bod doesn't take it seriously ask to speak to a manager, who will.
Si
