British Grocer Apologizes After Charging Woman £930.11 for a Banana
No, it was not covered in gold.
Image: Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Oh the perils of online delivery. Sometimes you wind up with the wrong items; sometimes your packages get stolen. And sometimes you open your box to discover that you’ve been charged over a thousand dollars for a piece of fruit.
OK, maybe that last one’s not so common. But unfortunately for Bobbie Gordon—a resident of Nottingham, England, and mother of three children—that’s exactly what happened when she went looking for the banana she had ordered in a delivery box from the Asda grocery chain.
In a tweet to the company’s service team, Gordon expressed her shock and alarm over the fact that she had been charged £930.11 ($1,308) for a single banana, which should have cost her £0.15 ($0.21).
Thankfully, Gordon’s credit card company flagged the transaction as fraud and blocked it, so did not end up paying the ludicrously inflated sum. The company responded maturely with ripe puns, apologizing for having “slipped up,” and thanking Gordon for “keeping her eyes peeled. They blamed the incident on a computer error.
Gordon, however, managed to find humor in the situation in her response to the BBC, which first picked up the story.
"I told my seven-year-old 'you must really enjoy this banana, you must cherish every mouthful'," Gordon said.
The day her story was published, she showed off a bit of cynicism:
“So. I’m the most read thing in the BBC,” she tweeted. “The UK is screwed.”
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