Substituted items online shopping

[Nymeria01]

Today Tesco's delivered my weekly online shop, which almost always has some pragmatic substitutions. However today instead of a pack of 8-15 Drynites I got size 6 night time pull ups. AIBU to think that you cannot substitute one type or size of nappies for another?

You know I see this all the time on here and Ive never had any funny or ridiculous subs

Boring shop is usually spot on.

castle can I send some love your way?

As my user name indicates - I have spent most of the last decade surrounded by tiny grabby children, run off my feet and/or not terribly mobile with pregnancy related ailments.

It's a complete game-changer to get groceries reliably delivered to the door. I link it up with menu plans etc - and it is literally the backbone to household management.

*lurve to grocery delivery bods

That's very interesting, Castle53. I often think life would be so much easier if we understood what was going on behind the scenes because that would influence our own behaviour.

You may not know this but do the items we reject feed back into the system so as to influence future substitution recommendations?

We once had grapes substituted with 2 large Leeks... but it wasn't classed as a substitution as they had put a sticker on them stating the were loose grapes.
I was bemused by it, as either the packer didn't know the difference between grapes and leeks, or the grapes at Tesco look just like Leeks. I rang the help line and explained and was given a refund and told to keep them. I thought that was pretty good of them, but of little help when I needed fruit for packed lunches.

I stopped using Tesco deliveries after they kept failing to send half of my items and didn't send substitutions (just a note saying no appropriate items - hard to believe they had no juice at all, or milk, or eggs).

I have found Iceland delivery to be good though.

cozie Sorry, don't know that. The substitutes that come up on the system are done centrally (as, by the way, is the heating/AC in our store, from somewhere in the middle of the country and we're in the southeast!). There are a few ridiculous ones that always come up and we try and inform the pickers so they override those, but there are a few hundred pickers, doing various shifts from 4 am until 5.15 pm, 7 days/week, so it's easy to miss someone, especially as there's a pretty high staff turnover.

That's OK Castle - I just wondered. I'm sort of assuming that any rejected substitution is a PITA for the store (indeed some items might not be 'recycleable' I'd have thought or at least not worth feeding back in to the system) so I wondered whether the system 'learned'. (eg X is an acceptable sub for A but Y is not - and so on.)

I never cease to be amazed in fact just how well the pickers do. I'd be a mess.

Yes, it's true that some rejected subs end up being "waste" as they'll have been out of the freezer/chiller for more than 20 mins in total. Sometimes bread/cake can't be put back as it's not out of date as such, but out of acceptable date/time parameters.

You do get some (quite a few, actually) customers who want a week's BBE date of one week+ on their bread, even the bakery stuff. The only bread that has that sort of timescale is the "longlife" bread that imo tastes rank.

Funnily enough, bananas are one of the items that are most complained about as they're so hard to get right. What I like in a banana, you may not. We do get customer requests sometimes such as they would like green bananas, but the whole batch that has come in may be yellow so their request cannnot be fulfilled.

My beef about online delivery of bananas is that they are hardly ever packed in a way that gets them to my door without any bruises! Over and over again they are packed with the potatoes or the tins of baked beans. I don't buy them online any more.

I have a friend (who may well come to this thread) who claims she had a pack of nappies substituted with sanitary towels and a box of sticking plasters.

She took a photo of her shopping and posted it to the supermarket's Facebook page to complain.

All Bananas should be packed on the top of the shopping and definitely not in with potatoes of beans. In fact, baked beans should not be packed with fruit and veg. The rules are, no food with non-food, no tins or jars with crisps/biscuits/soft stuff, petfood to be packed separately, toiletries to be packed separately and bananas and eggs to be packed on the top so that the drivers/despatchers can see them, however, because of these rules, sometimes only one thing can be packed in a bag, and some customers complain about that, too .

I don't buy bananas online either - or certain things that I've found, from experience, don't often do well with packing. (Eggs are one.) Bummer for the stores because they've got to keep them available.

Mine works the other way. I asked Tesco for a box of 6, large free range eggs. They sent nothing, claiming that they didn't have a suitable substitute.

All mimsy you should order your bananas from Morrisons they come wrapped in bubble wrap.

Isabella It's quite possible that they didn't have any free range eggs. As you have requested free range, they wouldn't have liked to send you non-free range/barn/value.

I would be pretty annoyed if I got the wrong size nappy.
Tesco recently couldn't substitute me any potatoes. I can't believe they didn't have any potatoes in store. I'd ordered some finest ones too so not like they needed to upgrade me. Sadly I had planned on mashed potato for tea.
Last week I ordered a tesco finest family steak pie. They substituted it with an individual chicken slice! Not quite going to feed 4 of us for Sunday dinner!

It's going to make life interesting for you,Castle, when/if a bag charge comes in in England and customers say 'No Bags'. (Unless you work for a store that's decreed that online comes in bags and that's that.)

Castle, your job seems really tough. I saw the Panorama documentary about warehouse picking for online orders (Amazon) and I was horrified at the conditions. m.youtube.com/watch?v=UQATFbLvIHk

Duchess I was shocked about that documentary, too. Be reassured, my job's not like that at all. We definitely don't have zero hours contracts; we do have "flexi" contracts where people have fixed hours, but have to work specified extra hours if requested to do so, eg they work 4 hours Monday morning and may then be sent home, or may be requested to stay on and work another 4 which they then have to do. Not every contract is like that by any means, though. Many people are on fixed hours contracts.

cozie I, too, am wondering what it's going to be like when customers have to be charged for bags. I reckon they will think that the company will profit when, in reality, all the money is to go to the government to pay for green initiatives. I have various ideas in my head of how we should proceed and am interested to see what will happen. I think that Waitrose charge each customer for an average number of bags, depending on the number of items ordered, eg 1 bag per 8 items. It works for them, but I cannot see it working for us, due to the sheer number of customers that we have. Online grocery shopping is definitely a growing market.

SweetPea I can't believe that, either. We would always have some kind of potatoes, but if you ordered Finest baby potatoes, we may not have anything like that and may have to substitute baking potatoes. We may not substitute "value" items for ordered ones. Also, the slices are not stored near the whole pies, so our pickers would have to go far to substitute a slice for a whole pie.

I use Tesco and Sainsbury's for online shopping, castle. (I also use B&M LIDL, Co-op and everyone else.) Both have adopted the 'average charge' approach already trialled in - Wales was it? - although Tesco give you the option of No Bags if you want it. (Sainsbury's do not - they deliver in bags and that's that.)

If a customer has chosen bags, I think it will make little or no difference to the pickers. The calculation of the charge is designed to satisfy overall the government and customers, I suspect, and not to reflect actuality.

As a former picker, I can assure you that pickers do not receive adequate training in substitutions. They're expected to pick an unattainable number of items in an hour, which means it's usually a question of grabbing anything vaguely similar or being disciplined for being too slow. The punishment is humiliation and hard labour. They can override the ridiculous subs that the machine offers, but bear in mind that most picking is done between 4am and 8am, and that this is an unskilled, entry level position, attracting lots of very young or very desperate people. I was both! I often had to help colleagues who didn't know what a certain vegetable looked like, for example. Also, they are limited to what is on the shelves at the time of picking. Picking is often done at the same time as stock replenishment, and they can't go back to your order later to add what wasn't available then.
You're much better off accepting no substitutions.

The supermarkets need to allow more time for the pickers to make sensible choices. It will cost more money but are they too stupid to realise they are losing more in non repeat business and the time it takes for food to be returned to store, or possibly thrown away if it is fresh/frozen and has been out of cool boxes too long.

I think there is a lot of excuses being made. A packer might not know that rolls and baps are the same, really? Seriously? Even allowing for North South regional differences they can read what it is on a packet!

Seems to me they need more training and more leeway to make sensible substitutions rather than being told by a computer.

It may not be regional differences, Itsfab. I wonder if, given what Peace says about the time most pickers are working, if there is a high proportion of migrants from other parts of Europe who have the language and cultural barriers to overcome as well as the ludicrously fast pace of work expected.

I'd like to thank Peace and especially Castle for taking the time to tell us about the other side of all this.

I'd also like to thank King Joffrey for that link upthread. Hysterical!

I'd pay a touch more to allow pickers to take a bit more time over their work, btw. Just on grounds of common humanity, not only because it might improve matters with the substitutions.

Castle, I'm glad to hear that your job is not exactly like the Amazon one!

cozie Where are you? In Wales? I'm in southeast England and we don't charge for bags atm, but that is due to change in 2015. It's interesting that Sainsbury's don't allow for no bags. That's probably because the delivery would take longer, I presume.

Gah, I wrote out a whole long post and it got lost. I'll try again.

Peace "humiliation and hard labour", really? The picking rate is attainable, actually, as most pickers are able to pick at that rate and many can pick faster. It's true that we are limited to what's on the shelves at the time of picking and replenishment is done at the same time, but most replenning is done by the night shift for the early (between 4 and 8 am) shift. That is when the majority, but by no means all, of the picking is done. That first shift is the most pressurised as delivery starts at 7am which means the first vans have to leave at 6am. As it takes the trolleys about 30-45 minutes to go through the system it means that the pickers only get about 45 minutes to get those first deliveries picked, which is really pretty fast.

Itsfab The PP was talking about a bread substitute. That's why I said a picker wouldn't necessarily know to substitute rolls for bread. I agree that rolls and baps are sort of the same, but you can't put rolls in the toaster, for example. I know that you say that we are losing repeat business, but we have many, many new customers every single day. I'm sure we do lose some repeat business, but many customers ring to tell us of problems with their shopping and most don't leave. Online shopping really is a growth business.

Allmimsy It's true that we do have a number of Eastern European colleagues, but not disproportionately and they are quite as capable of doing the job as anyone else. It really is not feasible to pay the pickers more as only one of the big four actually makes money from online shopping and they are the one that pays the highest hourly rate, anyway, apart from Lidl/Aldi.