Shoppers using the Tesco Catterick Garrison store have been asked not to abuse the company’s community funding scheme.
The plea comes after customers have been reportedly hoarding blue tokens, grabbing them from the tills and discouraging customers to vote for some projects.
The company’s Bags of Help scheme sees shoppers given a blue token when they pay for their goods.
They can then choose to put the token in one of three boxes as they exit the store.
Each box represents a local good cause and the more votes the good cause gets, the more funding it receives from the store.
The funding is raised through the sale of reusable bags for life.
But Julie Sutherland, Tesco Community Champion at the Catterick Garrison store, said shoppers were abusing the scheme.
She posted on Facebook yesterday: “This is not a post I ideally wanted to put on, however it has been brought to my attention that our Bags of Help (blue tokens) is currently being abused.
“The ‘hoarding’ of blue tokens, the grabbing of tokens from our tills, and then popping them all in one project, and the discouraging of other projects to our customers, will NOT be tolerated.
“If any more events like this are seen, it will be reported to our Bags of Help official team and the project will be removed from the voting round.
“Please let everybody connected to your group, charity, school or organisation know of these rules, whilst you are in the voting process. One token, one vote.”
Bags of Help has awarded over £80 million in grants to over 27,000 community projects since launching in October 2015.
