Why can I never find the Marmite in Tesco?

You know what I hate? Never being able to find the Marmite in Tesco.

(Actually it happens in all supermarkets, but Tesco just happens to be my closest. And I like shopping there. Certainly don't have a problem with the deli counter or the beer section... but it's little things like this that sour the whole experience, so I thought I'd write about it. Culture of continuous improvement, that's what I say.)

I mean, it's hard enough for a punctuation mark to reach the shelf in the first place, let alone find out the Marmite's not where you expect it to be when you get there.

But Marmite's a bit of a special case, isn't it?

Even though it works best on toast, it's not in the "spreads" section. You know, all those vegetable fat and margarine-type things (along with actual butter, but who buys that these days?) For some reason, Tesco's marketing boffins don't think Marmite and butter belong on the same shelf.

Well, that's fair enough I suppose. (Some weirdos do other things with Marmite, like stirring it into hot water. I mean, nobody does that with butter. Nobody who isn't Mongolian, anyway.) But it's never in the non-buttery spreads section either. You can grope your way along the mayonnaise and mustard shelves as far as you want, but you'll never reach the yellow-lidded jar of desire, oh dear me no. And that's when I start to get a little agitated.

(Watch most men in your local Tesco superstore - you'll see them check the butter section, then the "things in glass jars" section, and finally walk around with furrowed brows for a few minutes before giving up. Trust me, they're looking for the Marmite. (Men never ask for help in these situations.) My sister Rave never seems to have a problem; maybe it's just a man thing.

Usually, the last part of my Marmite quest involves a foray into the Bread section. Given Marmite's deep and meaningful relationship with toast, you'd expect the Tesco people to at least have put the two within an aisle's reach of each other. But no. The dark brown stuff always seems to be at least one shelf-stack removed from the tasty breakfast ingredients that make it sing. And that's plain silly.

So you might think I'm short of Marmite, but no. In fact, I have about eight jars of Marmite in my kitchen. Because Marmite is so hard to find, I grab a jar whenever and wherever I see it. And that's not very "customer-facing" on Tesco's part, now is it? I'm annoyed.

Let's have some proper customer engagement!

I'm Rant. And I'm one frustrated little apostrophe.

You might think being a small blue punctuation mark'd be enough reason to be frustrated, but that's not it. (Not all of it, anyway.) Most of the time I quite enjoy being a small blue punctuation mark. Bit of 'sleb culture to it - it's good to be different, that sort of thing - although Hello! magazine hasn't exactly been a-knocking. (And if they did, I'd do the usual thing: just sit here without enough opposable thumbs to work the doorknob.)

But anyway, this is my blog. Yes, that article you read this morning was wrong. There aren't a hundred million blogs on the web any more - there's a hundred million and one. So why did I bother? I mean, I'm not yer average save-the-planet, hug-the-trees type. My idea of a good time is sitting down on benches displaying "Wet Paint" signs so I can have a good complain to the park people.

But give me a moment, you'll be dazzled. Really you will. (Sorry. I get a bit sarky sometimes. Goes with the job.) You see, I work for Rapide Communication. These people do customer and employee engagement - connecting people together, whether it's by their phones, their computers, their iWotsits or just plain nattering face-to-face. The idea is, if you listen to enough people carefully enough, and take the time to really understand what they're saying, you can make the sort of changes in your business that make a HUGE difference. "Customer-driven", "Creating delight", you know the buzzwords. And they love doing it. Brings a tear to the eye, it really does. (I'm doing it again, aren't I?)

When I say I "work for them", I don't mean they pay me a salary or anything (that's another thing to be curmudgeonly about) but they put up with me around the office and my face is on their posters and stuff. Along with my sister Rave, we're the twin faces of customer engagement. Real customer engagement - that means talking to people and listening back, not the Your-Call-Is-Important-To-Us stuff you hear from helpdesks.

You might not have seen us, but whenever you have a bit of aggro with a company because it's not paying attention ... or on the other hand, when a company's done something brilliant that made you jump for joy and shout "Hallelujah!"... and you just wanted to talk to them about it ... one of us was there, hovering just behind your shoulder. Oh, yes we were.

(Well, maybe not every time. Six billion people in this world and only 24 hours in a day you know. Besides, if I don't get out of the office by 5.30 the traffic on University Road is awful.)

So that's us: I'm Rant, she's Rave. We've got a nose for customer engagement. (All right, two noses.) I do the gnashing-and-wailing stuff: every time someone around here has a story to tell about a missed opportunity to sort something out - something they could lose a customer over, something that's fixable but never seems to be picked up - they talk to me. And starting now, I tell those stories on my blog. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Well, you don't have to be afraid. Being Midlands born and bred means I tell it like it is. That means I'm going to name names. (That's the fun part.) So if your job has anything to do with customers (hint: it has) feel free to come back and have a read from time to time. (There's an Atom feed too, if you prefer it without the pretty pictures. See if I care.) Stories from my mates here are already coming in: I'd better get writing. Blogging's a slow process when all you can do is bounce up and down on a keyboard one letter at a time, but it keeps the weight off...