Mushrooms in place of tampons, a frozen pizza substituted for tinned peaches, and cream crackers instead of Christmas crackers. These are among the “bizarre” supermarket substitutions reported by online shoppers in a new poll.
Just over a third of online grocery shoppers (34%) reported having received a substitution in their most recent grocery delivery, the survey for consumer group Which? found.
Asda was the worst offender with more than half (56%) of customers receiving a replacement product in their last order. When asked about the strangest substitution of the past year, one of its shoppers recounted their bemusement at having ordered washing powder only to unpack 10 cans of beer.
So throwing this open to the floor: have you had an silly substitutions?
Because there’s no actual logic to their code. They’re just swapping in whatever they have in stock. They want money.
I love having shit like this happen. It means I can go and mark it as an unreasonable substitute, or I’ll just say it was missing, and I get it for free
Nice life hack.
I’d love to just sit down with these people and ask them to explain their reasoning.
I’ve worked with these people for fifteen years.
The reasoning is that they’re expected to pick at an absurd rate that no normal person doing their shopping would be able to get close to, with little to no training and a system that not only discourages making decent substitutions but actively encourages it because ultimately sending a bad sub is still preferable to not getting the vans out on time.
No one would swap Mushrooms for Tampons unless there was a reason for doing so. The customer doesn’t get it obviously, but if it’s to make a silly choice or get hauled in for a poor pick rate, I know which one most would make.
That makes perfect sense actually.
Probably something like “£5 loss on item isnt worth an extra 5 minutes traversing the shop and a van potentially being 5 minutes behind scheduled departure (thus the whole schedule being 5 minutes behind)”.
I guess its freakanomics. Cheaper to take a few potential losses if the customer actually rejects a poor substitution than definately miss schedules (and metrics).
Infact, i bet scheduling metrics (easily and automatically measured) are KPIs (thus bonuses) as opposed to customer satisfaction (much harder to measure).
When metrics become targets, they fail as metrics
I recently got butternut squash exchanged when they didn’t have carrots
…I guess they’re both orange inside
The weirdest one we’ve had was when we were trying to put together a little charcuterie board and ordered some cheeses for it: brie, aged cheddar, that sort of thing. Apparently the person putting the order together couldn’t find the display of cheeses, so they instead went to the deli counter and got some ultra processed flavored cheese slices, things like bacon and onion flavor and ranch flavor. Not even sort of what we were wanting
Sometimes does get a bit dodge with the picks if you rely on specific dietary products seems picking doesn’t follow the same laws as food prep.
Nothing too absurd, but with regularity I’ll put in plant-based dairy free products (because there’s a dairy allergy in the house), but be given the substitute of the dairy version of the same. Cow’s milk intead of oat milk, regular yoghurt instead of soy yoghurt, regular ice cream instead of vegan ice cream, etc.
