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Tesco Online goes boffo on booze

Intoxication at your fingertips...

Tesco, the "world's largest online grocer," has "improved" its online store again, and The Register's veteran shoppers view the prospect with the usual gloom. For reasons best known to itself, Tesco is addicted to continuous innovation; with every rev the buttons and departments tend to move around, and weird bugs and features scamper around the site, frequently poleaxing your ability to find food, and buy it.

Until yesterday our favourite boffo behaviour of the Tesco site was the time it was completely impossible to buy pizza, presumably because of some bizarre indexing error. But yesterday's feature - disappointingly, now fixed - trumped that with ease.

Tesco has a nice wine selector system which (as far as we can figure out) won't select anything for you at all if you're too picky about grape type, region, price or whatever, then when you give up and just leave the parameters wide open, it tries to ply you with Blue Nun and Crabbie's Green Ginger Wine. Yesterday, however, a helpful pop-up window had been switched on to jump in and offer you access to the wine selector whenever it seemed appropriate.

Appropriate to the software, that is. Not only did the popup kick in whenever you searched for something wet (lemonade, Coke, we're not sure about halibut, because we forgot to try) - things associated with wet, things you were supposed to wet before drinking, unleashed the blessed thing. Teabags? Oh yes... For a few, hilarious hours, Tesco was pushing booze at anyone reckless enough to wander into the online store while even slightly thirsty.

Then of course, when you finally made it through the aisles to the checkout, it was down... ®

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