The revenge of the loyalty card

I’m interrupting my series about diabetes to take a moment to look into the way Tesco beat EuroSpar’s craziness for what concerns UTF-8 handling in my surname.

So to cut down the time I spend getting my groceries, a couple of months ago I started ordering online from Tesco and get it delivered to my apartment. It’s nice because they have quite a wider selection for some things than the EuroSpars and for some things at least, better quality.

In particular, Italian-style plain tomato sauce costs a third if not less at Tesco compared to EuroSpar — let alone more boutique style places like Fresh or Il Valentino!

When I registered, they asked if I had a Clubcard already (their loyalty card) which I didn’t have, and so they said that one was on its way to me. After a month ordering from them without receiving the card, and with the delivery receipts not listing any points at all. I called them and they apologized and said they would re-send me the card, fine. I received it the past week: I’m surprised An Post was able to actually deliver it, as it was addressed to R P Ego Elio Etten Di — I think the UTF-8 messed hard with their text processing. The card itself, got sent at name Mr D Petten.

I tried registering on the website with all possible combinations of name and address (yes the address was misspelled on the letter as well, Partment rather than Apartment), but no dice. Today I called them. And I think both me and the operator sweated heavily: first he asked me for my Clubcard number, I start giving it to him, and he tells me it’s wrong “It has to start with 634” “But mine starts with 400!”. Then he started asking me what’s the surname on the letter, and as you can guess above, I had no clue of what they recorded as surname. Then after some more repeating that what my name is does not match what’s on the card, I got them to actually set up me up with the correct name and address.

But I wanted to actually get to the website, so they said they would send me a link reset password. Instead, what I receive is my old password, in clear-text. I tell the operator “That’s not what should happens” “That’s what I got here”. I find “We take security very seriously” in the body of the email that contained the password laughingly. It’s interesting that this was reported over two years ago and is still not fixed. Lovely. I thank my colleague Brice for having shown me SuperGenPass so I can at least make sure not to compromise my usual safe passwords anymore.

Okay so I log in on the home delivery website for which I was obviously already registered, I connect, and I try to get the clubcard details, once again it asks me to enroll the card in my account. So the guy asks me if he should give me the number now… and I stay silent for a couple of beats. The number impressed on my card does not match the number the card should have! something messed it up and it was shifted a few digits left, with some extra digits added at the end. That’s why it did not start with the right digits. A new card is on its way to me, hopefully.

So the mere use of my real surname in their system was able to mess up their Cardclub handling so bad, that they ended up imprinting the wrong number on a card (not printed the way Decathlon does in Italy, this is actually creditcard-style embossing!), and sending it out.

On a different note to close the post, I published my glucometer tool and if you’ve got a different model or brand and want to write a driver for it, it’ll be very welcome.