What price service?
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Last week my colleagues on Truck & Driver magazine conducted the Great British Motorway Service Area Survey, and I volunteered to help. Between the 10 of us we managed to call in on the majority of the MSAs, sampling the food, inspecting the toilets and showers, checking truck-parking areas and comparing various prices. It was a real eye-opener.
Having interviewed Welcome Break boss Rod McKie
(CM 31 May) I’m a bit more sympathetic towards MSAs these days. I understand why they charge more for a can of Coke than the high street shops. After all, your local newsagent doesn’t have to maintain the road it’s located on or deal with hundreds of thousands of ‘customers’ who come in purely to use the loo. But there’s no excuse for charging £1.49 a litre for diesel at its South Mimms site, especially when 100-odd miles up the road Peterborough Extra was charging £1.38 a litre.
That said, I’ve got to congratulate Welcome Break for the quality of the food at its Bishop Stortford location. At £7.50, the steak and ale pie, chips and peas wasn’t cheap, but the quality was as good as any pub grub. The same can’t be said for the meal I ordered at Extra’s Baldock services. Check out the picture below. The stuff that resembles brown concrete is actually mushy peas. With only plastic cutlery on offer it took me some time to break my way into them, and it wasn’t worth the effort.
Another thing that surprised me was the average time it took to walk from the various truck parks to the toilets – close to three minutes at the sites I visited. This could explain why the acrid stench of urine was making my throat sting and my eyes water.
And on the subject of truck parks, why can’t they build them on a flat surface? You wouldn’t check into a hotel if the bed legs were different lengths!
The full story will run in the October issue of T&D, in the shops on 6 September.
Will Shiers