Supermarket home delivery mistakes.

[Pyranha]

A lot of these are not mistakes. They're deliberate.

My son does online shopping for Sainsbury's (i.e. they pick and bag what you order) and they are under instruction, if the item you order is not available in-store, to send an alternative usually of better quality or larger quantity at no additional cost to you. This is especially important in basic necessities like bread, milk, butter. This is to avoid disappointment on your part.

If you dislike the alternative product on delivery, the driver will usually knock it off the receipt and you get to keep it.

I think the same applies to other supermarkets.

Actually Sainsbury’s charge the full cost of the substitution (when we use them), but then issue a voucher for the difference between your choice and theirs, which is tiresome. You can refuse it, but then you don’t have an ingredient you are expecting, and I suspect the refund for the non-supply would take a few days, and the time taken for refunds can be an issue if you’re on a budget. I can understand that the voucher model means you might be more likely to use them again (even if just to use the voucher), but it seems like sharp practice to me. Of course, there’s a 'no subsitute' option, but you’re then still stuck if it’s an ‘essential'.

[Psamathe]

I don't know if it's the number of people being pinged 'cos of the number of Covid infections causing empty shelves but today I was due a Sainsbury home delivery and 1st thing (as always) they e-mail you with "we've had to substitute" and "we don't have the following" and it made the order completely useless given most meals are more than a single item so miss or bad substitute one and the other is useless. So for the 1st time I had to call them and tell them not to bother delivering as the driver would be spending forever scanning most of what was being delivered back onto the lorry.

When putting on a new order it was surprising how many items are "Sorry this product is unavailable".

So next slot not for a few days (but I'm hardly the 1st person to not have enough food for a few days) - wonder if/what they'll manage to deliver then!

But it does highlight the vulnerability of being dependent on such services. Visiting a store if they are missing something you can chose what for you is a sensible substitution or not but the related item and get something completely different; online not something that works.

Ian

[mjr]

My guru on supermarkets is Archie Norman, who rescued ASDA from the brink.

He made the point that customers doing their own shopping are, in effect, doing for nothing what has otherwise to be paid for. ie picking the stuff then driving it around. If home delivery is free to the customer, then they are being subsidised by those who do their own shopping.

This sounds like the view of someone who is blinkered by the current model of supermarkets. Delivery and collection customers could be served more cheaply by diverting ordered quantities of non-perishable items directly to order packers working at a postroom-style rack of order crates, instead of their current practice of paying one worker to put it out on the shop floor shelving and another worker to pick it off the shop floor again or search for a substitution and in some shops another to repack it into delivery/collection crates in the back of store.

Occado were very upbeat, but it seems they still won't break even to the end of the decade.

Yes, Ocado seem to have gone far the other way, with robots dropping incoming stock into a giant "postroom on its side". I bet that wasn't cheap. I wonder if it will pay off.

A few weeks ago, Ocado also suffered a warehouse fire after three of its robots collided. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/h ... 85814.html

And that's not their first BBQ https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-48919285

One of the "discounters" commented they had no plans for home delivery. Something along the lines that it represents 10% of the business and they are happy with the other 90%.

But would it be only 10% if someone taking a fresh look at "the business" could make online deliveries work without the extra costs and, more importantly for us, without all the mistakes and process annoyances?

[rjb]

Did your barbacue delivery arrive.
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source= ... 6bo1YOYE8F

[thirdcrank]

If anybody is blinkered here it must be me. The analysis I attributed to Archie Norman was something I read some years ago (IIRC when he was in Australia.) I see he chairman at M&S now, which may say something about the mess they have got into.

The other thing that my blinkered vision failed to spot more recently was the cut in Co-op divi.

[NUKe]

When Online shopping was in its infancy we used Tesco. For the Good Friday shop for the easter weekend.
Orange juice was out of stock so they substituted an orange smelling household cleaner 2 items were set to be out of date within the hour( it was 23:10 delivery) a couple of things weren't in the delivery but on the bill. I have never used a home delivery since and seldom use the bigger super markets

[PH]

Delivery and collection customers could be served more cheaply by diverting ordered quantities of non-perishable items directly to order packers working at a postroom-style rack of order crates, instead of their current practice of paying one worker to put it out on the shop floor shelving and another worker to pick it off the shop floor again or search for a substitution and in some shops another to repack it into delivery/collection crates in the back of store.

It's a relatively new and therefore evolving business, already several of the big players are distributing some of the orders from warehouses rather than stores. One such is being run by a logistics company I do some work for and most of the picking is mechanical. Once moved away from the store there's little chance of stock outages that are not shown on the website, that happens when one on those pesky customers gets there first! My last logistics job involved stock control on an average of 7,000 stock movements a day, small volume compared to a supermarket, perpetual inventory showed an error level of less that 0.01% and that could usually be traced to unreported damages.
It's the same in the takeaway food business, there's various kitchens (Rather ominously called dark restaurants) supplying the likes of Deliveroo and Just Eat which are not open to the public.
Which reminds me - although it was reported that Aldi were not interested in home delivery, they've teamed up with Deliveroo to offer just that.
I'm guessing the big loss for the retailer is the impulse buy, they put a lot of time and effort into getting people buy extra, it must be easier to resist if shopping online.
We'll see where it goes, it'll be some years before it settles down, but I've no doubt it'll continue to increase, but neither do I think it will completely take over, some people love to shop.

[mjr]

It's a relatively new and therefore evolving business, already several of the big players are distributing some of the orders from warehouses rather than stores.

Still evolving but not particularly new: Sainsbury's Direct launched 1995 (renamed Sainsbury's Online in 2004), Tesco Direct in 1997 and Ocado in 2000.

The 300% growth during the recent crisis seems to have given the players new incentive to improve at last, though, now that it's not only a market of captive audiences and people willing to tolerate annoying error rates.

I think at least one player (Tesco?) were charging extra for warehouse-despatched orders, which seems surprising.

I'm guessing the big loss for the retailer is the impulse buy, they put a lot of time and effort into getting people buy extra, it must be easier to resist if shopping online.

I'm not so sure. The few times I used it, I bought more through the two screens of pre-checkout offers than I ever do walking around the stores.

We'll see where it goes, it'll be some years before it settles down, but I've no doubt it'll continue to increase, but neither do I think it will completely take over, some people love to shop.

I suspect the majority don't love to shop and it's more that they really hate to spend almost as long clicking through the clunky websites only to suffer the sorts of mistakes discussed above. So I think there could be a big market for someone who does this right.

But yes, we'll see.

[Oldjohnw]

I must say we have shopped with Tesco home delivery for over a year now. No errors and just one unwelcome substitution which we chose to reject. We shop monthly. Once we started using the app it was straightforward enough.

No regrets whatsoever and we will continue when we move. We buy bread, meat and veg mostly elsewhere.

[mjr]

Once we started using the app it was straightforward enough.

If you trust Tesco with access to your calendar, email, location and network connection info and let their app run at startup... well, you're a lot more trusting with your information than I am.

Or maybe you have a sacrificial device that you don't use for anything else and leave switched off otherwise.

[Syd]

Over the past 8 weeks we have had no substitutions (Tesco), on Monday night deliveries, until today.

6 substitutes, of which 4 were perfectly acceptable and two were returned. Likely a sign of shortages begin again around here.

[mumbojumbo]

In the old days you lugged spuds home in rain.Now people are intolerant of minor errors and are easily disappointed. I am glad of anything edible.

[mjr]

In the old days you lugged spuds home in rain.Now people are intolerant of minor errors and are easily disappointed. I am glad of anything edible.

I'm not sure what you've been reading but stuff like household cleaner instead of orange juice is neither minor nor edible.

[mumbojumbo]

You are right. However the cleaner is not perishable ,is adaptable and most households I know do cleaning .I would be disappointed with orange juice as it is corrosive ,exploitative in sourcing and can induce type B and obesity.

[Oldjohnw]

You are right. However the cleaner is not perishable ,is adaptable and most households I know do cleaning .I would be disappointed with orange juice as it is corrosive ,exploitative in sourcing and can induce type B and obesity.

The point isn’t really your views or mine about the benefits or disbenefits of the different products but rather that it was a terribly careless substitution.