Morrisons customers say Christmas deliveries and discounts are down

Morrisons apologized after technical problems affected discounts and online deliveries across the UK.

Customers were unable to redeem discounts on their loyalty cards and Christmas deliveries were postponed at short notice on Monday morning.

Morrison said it was investigating the problems in stores and online but did not provide any information on the cause of the outage. All shops were back to normal by Monday evening, the BBC understands.

In response to the problems at Tills, the supermarket chain implemented some loyalty discounts for all customers.

It is making the prices of its top 100 cards regular prices for all customers, even if they are not members of a loyalty scheme.

More cardholders will also receive an additional 10% off their entire store “as forgiveness”.

Both measures will remain in effect until late Tuesday, Morrison said.

Customers who shopped on Monday before the 10% discount went live can return to the store to redeem the discount, Morrison said.

Some home deliveries may arrive late, and Click & Collect customers should wait for an email before going to the store, the company said.

But some customers told the BBC that their online orders – including their Christmas Day meals – had been canceled entirely.

And others told the BBC they had experienced similar problems earlier today, including over the weekend and “in the last few months”.

One customer said he missed out on a £20 discount.

“I added everything up as I went around the shop and it came to £70, which I should have spent nothing at the checkout with all my card discounts and vouchers,” Steve Weatherby from Huddersfield told BBC News.

“But it came in at £90. None of the discounts and offers like 50p off around the store were applied.

“So I had to pay it while I shopped for Christmas lunch and our essentials.”

He added: “Staff were getting upset because they weren't aware of what was going on and it wasn't their fault.”

Another customer told the BBC his online order had been canceled on Monday morning.

“I booked it years ago, when delivery slots first came up for Christmas,” said Moira Gray, from Northumberland.

Unable to leave the house due to illness, she added that she was “really stressed” because her order included turkey and trifle on Christmas Day.

“(Morrisons) said there was nothing they could do… They also said their system was down,” he added, adding that Morrisons offered a £10 Goodwill voucher.

Another customer, Lauren Calvo of Northumberland, had her delivery canceled in the morning and said Morrison told her it was due to an IT system problem.

“I saw the email at 8.30am and was a bit shocked because they had texted me last night saying the delivery was confirmed,” he told the BBC.

“It was my weekly shop to get me through Christmas, cat food and everything.”

Since this story appeared online, Morrison contacted Ms. Gray and Ms. Calvo and promised to deliver their orders for free on Monday.

It also disputed claims that the cancellations were due to major system problems, telling the BBC that they were separate issues that were dealt with by customer service.

But it said in a statement: “If there are isolated cancellations for any reason, our team will be in direct contact to resolve them.”

Morrisons were advertising big discounts in the run-up to Christmas, including some vegetables for 10p.

“There's never a good time for a technical glitch, but it's a nightmare for what can happen on what should be the busiest day of the year,” said retail analyst Natalie Berg.

“This will further erode consumer confidence and affect profitability.”

Monday was predicted to be the busiest shopping day for supermarkets this year, According to retail analyst Kantar.

Supermarket sales are expected to reach £13 billion for the first month of December.

Morrisons is the UK's fifth largest market supermarket according to Kantar with 8.6% of the grocery market in the 12 weeks to 1 December 2024.

“Retailers are offering more and more deals with their loyalty cards and shoppers will feel cheated if they can't access them,” said Ronan Hegarty, news editor at trade publication The Grocer.

The Morrisons website was also down for some time in the morning, with error messages on some pages suggesting invalid or late responses from the server.