Waitrose

This branch of Waitrose offers quick check, self scan, café, click and collect, wine glass and fish kettle hire and cycle parking. There are also toilet facilities.
It is a medium to large size and carries a wide range of top quality items.
Staff are really helpful!
As it is next to Beckenham Junction station, it’s easy to access but has plenty of parking if coming by car. You can get a free coffee/​tea with any purchase if you have a My Waitrose card!
There are also fresh counters inside (fish, cheese and deli) — also in summer there are plants and basic gardening tools/​compost etc.

I came back from living abroad to find that my local Waitrose was suddenly twice the size it had been! Or rather there were twice as many aisles, but they were actually half the width… This narrowness has resulted in a couple of ‘death aisles’ (the chilled cheese and milk ones come to mind) where it is actually possible to loose a limb if there are more than three people trying to look at the brie at the same time. I have a theory that they were built on an ancient Indian burial site, as perfectly rational people turn into zombie-​like creatures with murder in their eye in response to the lack of personal space. This is almost always made ten times worse by the very helpful and strategic placement of several large trolleys with new stock that never actually seems to move. I suspect a complex government psychological experiment to see just how far perfectly respectable middle-​class people can be pushed before someone bites someone else’s ear off…
I really shop here because the alternative is the huge Sainsbury’s Savacentre in Bell Green, and I simply cannot deal with the incompetence of the staff, or the huge crowds that it attracts. (I love Sandi Toksvig’s quote: «I like Sainsbury’s — keeps the riff-​raff out of Waitrose»)
Also, I use the self scan gun, which means no queuing (usually) and it helps to flag special offers etc.
The produce is slightly limited, as it’s just not that large a store, but it does the basics quite well. I agree with the previous reviewer about inexplicable absences of certain products for weeks at a time. Also, I shall never forgive them for introducing pretzel baguettes into their bakery and then cruelly withdrawing them once I was hooked.
On the plus side, it is easy to park, the staff are actually intelligent and seem to care, and the fresh fish selection is great.

Waitrose; it feels like an old pair of shoes to me now, when it originally felt like I was walking on hot coals. With Waitrose Essentials now, it makes it more viable as a weekly shop for normal people. I like the store. As a regular, I find everybody friendly and the range of goods is excellent. One annoyance is sometimes they’ll not have something for MONTHS. Currently, it’s canned mushrooms. I’ve had problems with goods and they’re always sorted. Can’t fault them.