Thousands of Tesco shoppers have had a stressful morning trying to book one of the supermarket's Christmas delivery slots.
The option to book a delivery slot for Christmas was opened to Delivery Saver customers at 6am today, 15 November, but the online queue system to secure a slot has been branded a "nightmare" by customers. Many have reported error messages and crashes in the Tesco website and app due to the overwhelming demand.
As of 7:30am this morning, just 90 minutes after the queue was scheduled to open, shoppers shared updates of their place number - with some in excess of 200,000. Taking to social media to air their frustrations, shoppers branded the system the "queue of death" and "one of the most stressful times of the year".
READ MORE: Tesco shopper hails £3 energy-saving washing up liquid as 'game changer'
"Trying to book a Tesco Christmas delivery slot. Should be re-named Tesc-SLOW," one shopper wrote on Twitter. "Been queueing for over an hour, app crashed twice. Now back to 123,009 in the queue. Tesco, sort it out!"
Another posted a screenshot saying that they were number 47,326 in the queue with a wait time of "about 37 minutes", captioning the picture: "An hour later and I'm making progress in the Tesco home delivery booking queue for Christmas!"
Several other shoppers also reported being booted out of the app as it crashed and re-joining to find that they had been set back significantly in the virtual queue. "Joined the Tesco Christmas queue at 5:50am at 59,000th in the queue. Got kicked off the app and put back in at over 200,000," one unhappy customer said.
A second person who appeared to have been kicked out of the queue showed two screenshots of their queue place, the first at number 99,813 and the second at 224,321, writing: "Thanks Tesco! Logged on early doors for Christmas slot only for you to now kick me out of the app and start again!"
"Been queuing for my Christmas slot since 6am, got down to 90,000, was kicked out and have had to start again at 223,000! What a joke," a third customer reported.
Another frustrated shopper asked Tesco on Twitter: "Why is it every major holiday we have to spend time sitting in front of a computer screen trying to book a delivery slot? It's just gone 7:00am and therefore been waiting an hour so far trying to book a Christmas delivery slot. This is a total shambles."
A Tesco spokesperson told PA: "We’re currently seeing a high number of visits to our website and Groceries app and some customers are temporarily having difficulty logging on or placing orders. We’re really sorry about this.
"There are still slots available for both home delivery and click & collect over the Christmas period and we’re working to get things back up and running as quickly as we can. In the meantime, we recommend that customers use our website to place their order."
READ NEXT:
