Dunelm (Soft Furnishings)

Homeware shops are my guilty pleasure. Ok one of them. Even if I’m not buying anything, I can’t get enough of them, happy just roaming the aisles and coveting quirky (and often useless!) bits and pieces for an imagined dream house that I don’t own yet.
This is a particularly large outpost of Dunelm, with a staggering amount of choice for any room of your house, real or imagined. I had an actual purpose this visit — my mum and I had come to get clear plastic table covers for the marquee in my parent’s back garden, that I was decorating for my sister’s pre-​wedding events. We managed to find the stuff on a roll and I approached a member of staff to help cut the right lengths. That’s when it all went downhill.
I’ve never felt more unwelcome as a customer. She sighed loudly upon hearing my request, saying, ‘Oh if I’d known you wanted this cut, I wouldn’t have come to help.’ My mum and I exchanged a look, wondering if we’d misheard her. They even have a special over-​sized desk with metre rulers set into the top and deep grooves to cut along to make her job easier. Yet she continued to huff and puff her way through the task whilst muttering how much she hated doing it.
Yes she eventually cut the right lengths for us, but it was just uncomfortable — we even left her to the cutting for a while to browse the other aisles. Even when done she carried the pile to the till counters and complained to a colleague, ‘I just had to cut 14 of these!’. Well excuse us for actually wanting to buy something from your shop.
The price for the plastic sheeting was quite steep at £3 a metre but it turned out to be a wipe-​clean godsend for all the spillages that ensued last week. Sadly it was the service that sticks in my mind; hopefully my next visit will be a bit more enjoyable!