Thanks for your thoughtful comment - much appreciated.

There's certainly a common theme emerging from all of these comments, and it's a shame that appears to be a festering resentment towards the brand from employees.

One wonders how long it's current financial turnaround will last, given the discontent. Perhaps there will be another article in 18 months exploring where it all went wrong!

Thanks for your comment. That's sad to hear, and a short-sighted approach by management if it's the case as a rotten culture and unhappy staff will ultimately end up costing the company in the longer-term.

Thanks for your comment, Dave. My understanding is that not everything they sell to the public is a work of fiction - they also sell non-fiction as well.

Thanks for your comment, Sam. You raise a very interesting question - to word it another way, is there a confirmation bias that takes place in some experiences? As you say, families/individuals actively looking for positives and perhaps overlooking the negatives.

I wonder if it works the opposite sometimes too - folks are looking for negatives during their engagement with a business because their expectations are that they will have a bad experience due to preconceived notions about the brand.

Sampson would be delighted to know that his content continues to surface debate and thoughts long after his pieces were published. He was a great writer and thought leader and even those that disagreed with his ideas agreed that he was always thought-provoking.

Thanks for your comment, Mark. As you say, Primark has been highly successful up to now and the whole purpose of the trial is to identify risks and challenges, so I'm sure that they will only proceed with a full roll-out if they are 100% sure that it will cause no damage to the business or customer experience.

You are almost certainly correct about the title, Aki - but the optimist in me couldn't resist making it 'some' rather than 'most'! :-)

Thanks for your comment, Graham!

I understand the concern about putting CX in charge of marketing - certainly organisations will be watching the McDonald's/Walmart experiment with great interest.

I don't necessarily think that putting CX in charge of marketing is destined to always deliver less value to shareholders than with marketing in the driving seat, but I do think that it would need the right chief customer officer in place (specifically one with very strong commercial credentials) and with the right remit. The question is, if a company has the position and person that fits that description, are they really a chief customer officer as we know it, or is it really just a very customer-focused CMO?

Hi Sampson, I've corrected the link in the story. My bad - I added the link to Graham's original piece and clearly made a hash of it!

It sounds as if issues with item delivery are responsible for a large proportion of the complaints, so you'd imagine that as in-store shopping becomes more common again that we'll see the complaint numbers begin to drop.

Thanks for your thoughts, Steven. I guess one of the challenges for CX teams/programmes/leaders, is to have enough autonomy to be able to - for instance - define what its own function is, rather than having its purpose dictated by the CEO/CMO/etc. But can they get that autonomy until they've followed and delivered on these company expectations in the first place? Bit of a chicken and egg scenario perhaps?