Letter: Grapes of wrath

Sir: Might I heartily endorse Richard Gibson (Letters, 15 June) in extolling the system found in France, and increasingly rarely in this country, of the customer weighing and pricing produce. Recently, in a branch of Tesco, I was not permitted to buy a bunch of grapes because that produce did not have a code on the firm's computer system. After a wait of 20 minutes while an attempt was made to find the elusive code, the management were quite firm - no code, no sale.

Incredulous, I wrote to Sir Ian MacLaurin, Tesco chairman. Amazingly, this was the case - profuse apologies, impossible to eliminate human error, etc. But it seems that every item must have a code. No code, no sale.

Yours faithfully,

L. B. SMITH

London, N8