Who could forget the sorry tale of Linda and Tony Gilkes and their pie-related FURY at Morrison’s supermarket on Teeside?
Nope. Me neither.
But irritation involving savoury pastries is not a particularly common occurrence, and I – quite reasonably – thought that we were probably done with it for this year.
How wrong I was.
Because suddenly, there was this:
Here’s the first bit of the story:
A PENSIONER who eats ten sausage rolls a day was horrified to find that his packet only had nine.
Horrified, readers. HORRIFIED. (Just like you were when you found out that he eats ten sausage rolls a day.)
Please meet our 74-year old protagonist Tony Francis, described thus:
a regular purchaser of the snacks from his Aldi supermarket at Boundary Road in Portslade
As you’d need to be if you were stuffing ten of the bastards down seven times a week.
He might be from the opposite end of the country from the Gilkes’, but he is equally pissed off at his local supermarket because when he took his 9 sausage rolls, he found that they were full of METAL!
(Except they weren’t.)
Mr Francis said: “I was gobsmacked.”
Gobsmacked, readers. GOBSMACKED!
Gobsmacked enough to get in touch with his local paper and tell them all about his non-story. What follows is that story in the words of Mr Tony Francis.
I was in Aldi and usually buy the pack of 10 sausage rolls. When I got them home I found out there was only nine. So I tried to get in touch with the supplier, but ended up going through to Aldi itself. That’s when I found out that the rolls I had been buying every day had been taken off the shelves because metal was found in them.
On the plus side, Mr Francis is now magnetic and hasn’t misplaced his keys in weeks.
I’m joking, of course. The batch that he’d been eating had no metal in them at all, and weren’t the ones involved in the recall, as confirmed by an Aldi spokesbeagle:
The packet Mr Francis bought was not affected by the recall in June.
See? So all’s well that ends well, right? Not quite:
Mr Francis said the supermarket should have done more to warn him about the danger:
He said: “I’ve decided not to eat them. Surely they should have said it was not safe. I know it is not good PR. As a business, I would try to keep it quiet and move them off the shelves.”
Ah yes – the old hush-hush approach.
Like… er… this?
Aldi says product recall notices were displayed in prominent places such as the store entrance for six weeks. It includes a picture, product name, and reason for the recall.
Six weeks is forty-two days. That’s four hundred and twenty sausage rolls in Tony Francis’ world. You’d think he might have noticed that (what we presume must be) his favourite snack had disappeared off the shelves and was featured in big posters at the door of the store each time he entered. Or perhaps he missed the signs because he was so intent on foraging for his delicious flaky pasty-coated addiction in the discount superstore.
There’s a lesson in there for us all. Mine probably involves Castle Milk Stout.
There is good news for 6000 miles… at the end of all this though, thanks to a suitably bizarre inclusion in this wholly bizarre tale.
Here’s Mr Francis one last time:
But as a customer, I live on my own and this is a regular purchase for me. I’m not very IT friendly, and when I learned about it, I thought ‘crikey, how bad could it have been?’
It could have been really bad, Tony. Really bad. But your prowess in this new-fangled online world is of limited relevance here. Even if you were Bill Gates and you were eating ten metal-infused sausage rolls a day, it could still have been really bad.
The only positive about your lack of IT gumption is that you’ll likely never see this blog post taking the piss out of your allegedly traumatic experience at the hands of Aldi and their plutonium sausage roll manufacturer.
But we wish you well, and hope that you have found a less metallic, better counted replacement snack for your eating needs.
Maybe try to cut down a bit on the numbers though, ok?
