Title: Morrisons UK Supermarket staff refused to help and only confused an autistic woman who was looking for access advice.

Source: East Midlands autistic woman

Date received:  Oct 2020

Details: 

An autistic woman in her forties had trouble accessing supermarkets in the early days of the UK lockdown. She is usually totally isolated but found it essential to leave home to buy food as home deliveries were completely inaccessible for a period of time.

She queued for nearly an hour to enter a Morrison’s Supermarket in Derby to spend just ten minutes shopping. It had been the longest time she had spent outside of the home for several years and just before reaching home, she became incredibly distressed and had an emotional breakdown, while driving her car, as a result of the stress and anxiety of the experience. She realised that she would have to avoid repeating the experience at all costs.

Upon entering the store, once she reached the front of the queue, she saw a sign saying:

“Vulnerable people may be invited to enter the store without queuing”.

Not knowing the criteria for a person being considered as vulnerable, though she since discovered that the UK government and medical services do consider her to be, she contacted the supermarket for more information. She began this process by using the “contact us” form on the company’s website.

I have seen over twenty emails received by the autistic woman, none of which gave her any idea of what allowed a person to qualify as “vulnerable” in the eyes of the Morrisons Supermarket staff. She requested to be able to communicate with the manager and was told to phone him, which was not possible for her as she is not able to communicate verbally. Several times she was advised to write her question down and present it to a staff member in the store and received no reply when she asked how she could achieve this when she was unable to access the store.

She made it clear that all she wanted was to be able to avoid standing in public for a very long time and that she was willing to go to the store at any hour of any day. She received multiple replies advising her to use a telephone or give a note to a staff member. Apparently, the central administration staff for Morrisons find it completely impossible to communicate with the people who manage stores and have no way at all to pass messages along to them. The woman felt it impossible for her to queue for a long time to access the store, to be able to pass a note to anybody in the first place, but even if this were not the case, she felt that marching up to a stranger, in public, and thrusting a note in their hand with no accompanying explanation would be completely beyond her ability.

In desperation, she searched the internet for Morrisons email addresses that may allow her to communicate with people other than the staff who reply to the official contact form, who seemed to have no ability to communicate with other members of staff. I suspect this could be because Morrisons use an offshore service desk and they have no official communication channels with premises located within the UK. She tried each of the following email addresses a number of times, sending a brief and polite request for information on Morrison’s policy regarding “vulnerable” people:

She received no reply at all, from any of them.

The autistic woman only recently contacted me with details of her ordeal because she was tired and distressed from trying to explain her very simple need for information and being ignored or misdirected, time and time again.

Ultimately, as the lockdown progressed, she received communication from the government confirming that she qualified for a priority delivery slot with a British supermarket which she has been using ever since. Although she lives closest to a Morrisons store, she chose Asda as her active delivery and Tesco as a backup as she cannot bear to be in contact with Morrisons in any capacity, following her distressing experience. She also noted that when emailing Tesco, before she was able to receive a priority slot, she did receive authorisation to go to a Tesco store early in the morning and be able to enter without queuing, so long as she could provide documented evidence of her being autistic. She didn’t need to do this as it was soon after that she received a priority slot.

At no point did the woman insist that she ought to qualify as a vulnerable person, but in Morrison’s case was not even able to have such a status confirmed either way. This is a situation where somebody in the Supermarket administration could easily have helped an ordinary person who was having great difficulty buying food, but they declined to be of any help at all and instead confused and upset her. The woman also notes that in the early stages of her trying to get help from the government and NHS, she received an email telling her that a food parcel had been sent to her but it did not arrive and no further communication regarding it was ever sent.