Waitrose BikeHod

One of Waitrose’s less publicised recent customer services has been the provision of BikeHod trailers for customers to use, for up to three days free of charge, to ship their shopping home in. Since my local Waitrose is easily within cycling distance I have always feel somewhat guilty making a car journey just to do the weekly shopping… so this had to be worth a try.

If I am brutally honest, first impressions were not good. The staff seemed to have no real idea about how to loan one out, and spent a few minutes scrambling under the desks looking for the appropriate forms. I was told I wouldn’t need to do this part again, which I hope is true as it was somewhat time consuming, even if they did have the forms to hand.

Next, a special hitch had to be attached to saddle stem. This apparently had to be done by a member of staff, and involved the use of a spanner… which they had lost.

Thankfully at this point I could leave them to it, and went off to do my shopping (whilst hoping that the spanner turned up by the time I had finished, otherwise I would be towing the trailer home by hand). I paid for my shopping, and returned to find the woman who was helping out before… who immediately passed over to someone else who had done it all before, had a spanner in her hand, and came out to set up the bike.

This is where things started to go right. The brass hitch took about five minutes to put on the bike – again, my heart sank, because there was no way most people (myself included) would want to spend time jimmying that into place everytime they went shopping, especially if it was raining. Fortunately the new woman asked if I was likely to be using the trailers again, I said I was, and she told me the hitch may as well stay on the bike as they had plenty of spares.

The hod itself fitted on quite quickly, and I was off! Despite being filled with some quite weighty items I barely noticed the trailer at all. I was expecting some odd looks, but got none. In fact, I noticed cars giving substantially more space when passing than they had on my journey down to the supermarket sans traileur.

I felt a little like a Waitrose employee making a delivery, what with the branded Hod, and ubiquitous florescent jacket. I did ask about buying one – BikeHod do have them for sale unablazoned for about £250, however Waitrose are apparently looking into the prospect of selling them to customers branded. Maybe that would be slightly cheaper (well, I would hope so for the free advertising, but then again…).

Although Waitrose recommended not cycling at night using the trailers, there are plenty of hooks and tabs for attaching lights to (though arguably there could be more). The trailer itself felt sturdy and was easy to maneouver. My only real complaint would be staff training. Either I was very unlucky, or time simply has not been spent making sure people are up to speed. Should this endeavour take off, however, I guess that this will come.