Amber J.

This is what we sent to the company, what a mess!

Today was our first experience with your company after many years of using similar services through Albertsons.com and PeaPod.
Id like to share our experience with you.

Around 12pm today, we placed an order for the grocery store across the street from our house.
We did this because my wife is pregnant and grocery shopping is difficult for her at this point.
Our list included many of the items we typically purchase at this location.
The earliest delivery time was for 5pm-6pm, which we booked.

At 4pm, we started receiving text messages - a lot of text messages - stating items were out of stock and being replaced with other items.
The replacement items seemingly were dissimilar in several instances (i. E. 2 single yellow onions for 50 cents total were being swapped out for $2.50 worth of sweet onions, $1 boxes of organic macaroni and cheese were being swapped out for $7 bulk boxes which contained only 4 of the exact same $1 boxes inside them, a small bag of organic broccoli was swapped out for a massive sized non-organic broccoli, etc). We clicked the links, so many links, to request the items not be swapped and instead not be purchased at all as substitutions were unacceptable. To ensure we would not have these unwanted items purchased with our credit card, we placed a call to customer service.

The phone call said the wait time would be 5 minutes. 12 minutes later, Leslie answered the phone at your customer service. I explained we were new to this service and we did not want any substitutions on our order. I told her we had clicked to modify the items and reject the substitutions on the text messages we received - she said this was not possible to do. I told her to immediately notify the shopper we do NOT want any substituted items purchased. The items were dissimilar and I would go to the store myself to check the stock as I was certain that many items would not be out of stock as reported by the shopper. She confirmed the store location being shopped was indeed the one I had chosen, despite the website stating the shopping was being done in zip code ******* - which is more than 2 hours drive from my house at this time of day. She interrupted several times rudely as I tried to explain that I did not understand how these substitutions were being made or how their shopper uses discretion to do this. I requested the account be closed after this experience today, as this was an utter waste of my time and there was no rhyme or reason to the substitutions being made. Soon I would discover even more to be annoyed about with your service.

Indeed, I headed to the store while the shopper was still shopping our order and I easily located several of the items which were reported as OUT OF STOCK by your shopper. I ended up spending 45 minutes in the store locating these items and spoke with the store manager, who stated the shopper definitely did not ask for assistance in locating those items because there were so many they missed. I took photos of the items on the shelves, literally during the SAME timeframe as the shopper was shopping and in the SAME location. One of the most humorous examples was the OUT OF STOCK yellow onions - to which there were 150 lbs on the shelf in the produce aisle, according to the produce worker - I easily picked up the 2 onions for 50 cents I had ordered. I also picked up many other OUT OF STOCK items - including many boxes of organic mac n cheese for $1.

When I arrived home, the shopper had delivered their order to our house. No receipt was included in any of the bags or with the order. No complete items list was included anywhere for us to check the order. I am fairly certain I am missing several items, but without ANY access to a list of what was ordered, I cannot check off the items. The email sent to us shows a handful of items ordered, but requires to be clicked to view the entire list. When this link is clicked, there is a ERROR 404 PAGE DOES NOT EXIST message. In essence, your shopper did not attempt to locate the items, charged us for several substituted items which I specifically requested on the phone PRIOR to their purchase were NOT to occur, and I ended up spending the same amount of time in the store I would have had to anyways to get the groceries. Since I do not have any receipt or ability to verify your purchase on my credit card with the items delivered - I am only able to calculate the amount I was overcharged by your shopper purchasing items I specifically said NOT to purchase and an inkling there are additional missing items.

I sincerely hope your service improves, as this level of experience should not occur with any business, especially not when there are so many better, well-established options.