Woolies in meltdown: What went wrong
Woolworths has issued an official apology for the technical glitch that left thousands of shoppers around the country stranded on Monday afternoon.
News.com.au reports registers at hundreds of Woolies outsets across the country shut down just after 4pm yesterday, in an unexpected outage that latest just over 30 minutes.
Signs were promptly put up at the stores, apologising for the “system fault”.
Woolworths CEO Brad Banducci was quick to address the error and issued a statement.
“This was related to an update to our IT systems,” Mr Banducci said.
Check outs at @woolworths Crows Nest aren’t working due to a technical issue apparently. Around 100 people told to leave the store, many leaving full trolleys behind pic.twitter.com/a9EEBkD6wE
— Joshua Louder (@JoshuaLouder) April 16, 2018
“Our systems ultimately self-corrected themselves and we were back and open for trade across most stores by 4.30pm, with all stores now operational.
“This type of incident should not occur and we apologise unreservedly to our customers and store teams for the inconvenience caused.”
Social media posts showed frustrated scenes at Woolies outlets affected by the outage, with shoppers banked up in the stores with their trolleys, unable to move.
Some were told to leave stores, leaving full trolleys behind.
Some stores even pulled their shutters down, but this is believed to be a temporary measure to prevent more frustrated customers from entering the outlets.
Shoppers were quick to express their rage on social media, with Virginia Johnstone from Sydney posting on Facebook: “Woolworths you are having a laug ... I just spent 45 minutes shopping with 3 kids and your registers go down and you tell me (quite rudely) that I need to leave the store without my groceries.
“Good customer service would have been to let everyone currently in the store have their trolley load for free. But no ... you throw everyone out on school holidays with nothing for dinner. Bad form... I’ll stick to Aldi.”
Woolworths has 995 stores across Australia, and it’s believed close to 500 were affected.
What are your thoughts? Do you think Woolworths handled the incident well? Were you caught up at a Woolies outlet yesterday? Let us know in the comments section.
Hero image credit: Twitter / Joshua Louder