Home delivery good shopping substitutions

[SatNavSaysStraightOn]

My OH sent me this


Dull Men's Club® | My regular grocery delivery is due today and the usual message arrives regarding substituted items, which I can accept or not | Facebook

Which left the obvious question. For those who are (un)lucky enough to be able to home delivery, have you ever had weird substitutions?

 

[SandwichShortOfAPicnic]

The 12 pouches of whiskers cat food I had as a substitute for vegetable oil was a surprise.
I don’t even have a cat and have never ordered cat food!

 

[badjak]

How does that work?
They tell you on delivery and you accept or decline?
I've only ordered supermarket shopping once when I was put in quarantaine for covid due to travelling

 

[SandwichShortOfAPicnic]

How does that work?
They tell you on delivery and you accept or decline?
I've only ordered supermarket shopping once when I was put in quarantaine for covid due to travelling

You can look at the missing items or subs online before they arrive or not bother and they just tell you when they arrive.
If you don’t want a sub so long as it doesn’t leave their food chain (ie they take it out of the bag and put it back in the refrigerated lorry) it goes back on their ‘shelves’ and doesn’t go to waste.

 

[TastyReuben]

I don’t think I ever accepted any, the short time I did home delivery/curbside - the shopper, whether it was InstaCart or Kroger, would contact me during shopping, so that was real-time, and I think I always said no, just skip it.

 

[Barriehie]

I've never allowed substitutions the few times I've placed an online order. It's obvious that it's no telling what you'll get and I'm too precise to get the wrong item. Set me all off!

 

[karadekoolaid]

Never ordered food online. Ever.
Online supermarkets are still in their youth here.

 

[SandwichShortOfAPicnic]

Most of time here the subs are very good, usually just one brand for another.
I rarely have to send anything back apart from when the subbed ingredient list contains wheat and I can’t possibly expect that to be taken into account.
Almost all of my shopping comes from a central warehouse and is picked and packed by robots.

It’s only waitrose that I use who has a real person doing the shopping in the actual shop. They are the ones who substitute the most because they don’t know if it will be on the shelf when they pick the shopping.
A fully automated warehouse knows exactly how much of something will be on the shelves on the day you’re ordering for, it also means I get the freshest stuff. It’s a very slick system.

 

[AdaptAndAchieve]

I've only ever used asda or tesco - and I decided not to accept any subs from asda because they made choices I didn't like, eg white bread when I ordered wholemeal, or swapped a fruit flavour item for a mint flavoured one.

Tesco substitution system is actually pretty good and I've only ever had sensible subs off them. I rarely have a home delivery, it's more likely to be a click and collect order - that way I can check before collecting and go in the store to pick up replacements for missing items
When you order you can select substitution for each individual item, or just do a blanket accept for the whole order. They also allow a few words per item for you to specify.
So eg, I'd allow subs on milk, then in the text box specify something like "semi-skimmed". I can't fault that system