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It's not that I want to visit the store it's that I can't trust the store people to properly pick out fresh produce or good meat. When the stock person just ta

It's not that I want to visit the store it's that I can't trust the store people to properly pick out fresh produce or good meat. When the stock person just takes a bucket of apples and dumps them in without care so most of them are bruised, why would I want that same person selecting which apples to send me? Often times to find 3 apples I have to examine 10+. Most of the produce selection is this way. Meat selection is not much different. Selecting chicken without careful examination you'll get broken legs or wings. Now you have to consider the automatic substitution of equivalent items when something is out of stock. My dibetic friend was telling yesterday that they substituted regular mt dew for his order of mt dew zero sugar. Until the store starts employing people who care about product selection as much as I do, then I'll continue to make time to go to the store and pick it myself.

hvs 6y ago
We've been doing curbside pick up for groceries for the past few months and fresh food and produce are definitely the biggest problem with the substitutions being the second. The substitutions would probably be better/less often in more normal times, but the fresh food selection problem is always going to be there. For now we do it because our health is more important than our fruit quality, but we won't continue it when things achieve some level of normalcy again.
briefcomment 6y ago
Additionally, there have been times when perishables like non pasteurized juice, and milk have gone bad when I had them delivered. I realized that I do a good job of picking those items last during a trip to the store, and I drive home immediately afterwards, while the picker/delivery person is probably not incentivized to do the same.
karatestomp 6y ago
All those things, plus: 1) concern that prices online are higher so the delivery option's more expensive than it looks (food delivery services do this), 2) concern that some or all sale prices won't be used online—a lot of my shopping past my immediate needs consists of checking the canned and frozen sections for any actually good sales.
- lostapathy 6y ago
  This is why I’ve backed away from it. I don’t mind paying for delivery, but the fact that I oy both a direct few and a variable extra markup per item, and that markup seems to vary so much per item makes it hard to swallow for me. It just feels like scummy enough that I’ll go to the store. Give me an option where the cost of convenience is obvious and straightforward and I’d come back.
  - hckr_news 6y ago
    Delivery fee + Tip also. Best option is probably pick up as you save some time without getting charged other fees or needing to to tip anyone.
bdcravens 6y ago
> Now you have to consider the automatic substitution of equivalent items when something is out of stock. My dibetic friend was telling yesterday that they substituted regular mt dew for his order of mt dew zero sugar. Typically you have the option to indicate that you do not want any substitutions.
- alleyshack 6y ago
  They don't always respect this. I've had multiple Instacart shoppers replace items without marking them as replacements, including replacing some of them with things I explicitly indicated I did not want as replacements.
  - thejynxed 6y ago
    A company I do contract work for banned Instacart from one of their local stores entirely due to customer complaints to store management about unapproved substitutions.
    - wool_gather 6y ago
      Purely out of curiosity, how do the store police this? (I'm not very familiar with how Instacart operates, but I thought it was just a person going to the store as a normal shopper in your stead.)
      - applecrazy 6y ago
        I’m pretty sure the shoppers pay with a special card. They probably just tell the employees at the check out counter to refuse service to anyone with an Instacart branded credit card.
    - alleyshack 6y ago
      I'm curious what metrics are driving that behavior by Instacart shoppers. In my (entirely amateur/armchair) opinion, it would seem like the time you'd save by making an unapproved substitution wouldn't make up for the potential for negative reviews, which could get you driven off the platform entirely. Maybe a majority of customers don't care enough about unapproved substitutions to review poorly? Though reading through this thread suggests otherwise. Maybe there's some other internal metrics which shoppers or Instacart have access to that incentivize poor substitutions in the name of speed? Honest questions - I don't know anything about this business and it's interesting to me that it appears to be such a pervasive issue.
asiachick 6y ago
i think you're right. It's certainly my opinion that I don't want a USA store clerk picking my produce. On the other hand here in Japan most produce is much more cared for, probably to the detriment of the environment but still, far less bruised or bad produce. And yet, AFAIK, it's the same in Japan. People don't seem to want to order their groceries. Which makes me wonder if there aren't other reasons. One is that there's no good way to deliver. You have to be home to receive. They can't put your milk, butter, yogurt, ice cream some locker. You have to be home to receive, at least for people the commute to work, means it pretty much has to come between 6pm and 10pm. How many grocery delivery services can handle that? -- On the other hand, my mom says she's driving to the grocery store and everyone is doing pickup. The groceries are already chosen and packed up, you just drive up your car and the load the bag. So if that's true then people are willing to let others choose the produce.
- Enginerrrd 6y ago
  I'm inclined to agree. I think you're up against some deeply rooted human behaviors of wanting to sift through and gather/select their food. Those behaviors rapidly scale based on hunger... but frankly, no one in the income bracket that can afford to buy their food online ever gets really hungry in today's world.
kerkeslager 6y ago
Playing devil's advocate: an enormous amount of food waste is caused by people simply refusing to buy ugly food. It's literally less wasteful to shave off most of a carrot so that it's a baby carrot, than to try to sell the same carrots as-is. There's nothing wrong with the ugly carrots--but they'll rot on the shelves. Bruised apples are perfectly edible. Maybe you just don't like them, and that's fine--there's no accounting for taste. But I don't think it's outlandish for someone to give you a bruised apple. Broken bones in chicken aren't harmful--the traditional way of preparing jerk chicken involves chopping the chicken with a knife that just cleaves through the bones. Again, your preference here is valid, but it's your preference, not something that's objectively better. And these are some of the less extreme examples--being involved in my local CSA, I've heard people complain about potatoes with dirt on them, and literally heard someone refuse to buy eggs because they farmer got them from her own chickens. A lot of people's preferences around food aren't just arbitrary, they're downright illogical. Substitutions and expired food are obviously problematic--there's lots of room for delivery services to do better. But I am not convinced that the average person does a much better job selecting their food based on "quality".
- simonebrunozzi 6y ago
  Check out Imperfect Foods (I am not affiliated; simply a happy customer) - they send you a box with "imperfect" food that otherwise would have gone to waste. There are also other similar companies doing this.
- denimnerd42 6y ago
  You don't get any discount in this case though. You're still paying $2-3/lb for bruised apples that are like you said literally waste at that point and $2-5/lb for chicken that if you picked out yourself would be of higher quality. Even if they did give you a price break for lower quality food. They'd still do things like give you a pineapple that will never ripen before it rots like we received last week.
  - kerkeslager 6y ago
    What I'm saying is that your perception of quality is not actually objective quality.
basseq 6y ago
Even if quality is there, how ripe do you want? Are you going to use those avocados tonight, or later in the week? Do you like green bananas or ones that are turning brown? Let alone the "what looks good today?" or "what's on sale today?" method of shopping! Even packaged goods are tough. When I'm in a store, I know quickly which product I want. I may not remember the brand name, but I can scan the shelf and find it. Online, I have to sort through a myriad of options, not to mention sizes and variants. BBQ sauce, for instance, returns 58 results on Peapod. Sweet Baby Ray's, which I like, is 22 of those. There are 13 different variants (original, hickory & brown sugar, honey, buffalo sauce, sweet'n spicy, honey mustard, honey teriyaki, sweet teriyaki, sweet vidalia onion, maple, sweet chili glaze, honey chipotle, no sugar added) and 7 different sizes (14oz, 16oz, 18oz, 18.5oz, 28oz, 40oz, 80oz). Holy crap! I know what the label looks like, and I know the bottle is about yea-big. The images online are 200x200... I can barely SEE the label. Then, what if what I want isn't in stock? Is it going to appear on the page? Am I just not going to get it? Would I get a substitute, as I might if I was in the store? By the time I do that mental exercise for 50 items, I might as well drive to the store. These are hard challenges. One thing that might make a difference is integration with club cards. Giant knows what I buy down to frequency and UPC. Why haven't they done better integration to link my in-person buying with encouraging me to buy the same items online?
- Ididntdothis 6y ago
  "Let alone the "what looks good today?" or "what's on sale today?" method of shopping!" That one is really important with fresh food. Maybe the lettuce looks good or the cucumbers, who knows?
- ISL 6y ago
  For me, the wish is for scripting. Most of my buying is algorithmic, but the filters don't match my algorithms. It is difficult to express, "Please give me the cereal that I like the most that is under $X/lb. If there is an exceptional deal, buy more." without an API or scripting.
  - basseq 6y ago
    Which, if you break it down further: 1. Everyone's "algorithm" is different. Even if you could bake every possible filter into your eGrocery product, can you imagine the UX nightmare? 2. The "that I like the most" is a tough thing to quantify. Who is "I"? Me? My wife? My kids? My mom who's coming to visit this weekend? What do I like? Specific brands? Things I've bought before? From that store, or a different one? Things I might like because they share characteristics?
ISL 6y ago
Our local store, QFC in Seattle, has been doing a great job of selecting produce for our curbside delivery. Quality has matched or beaten what I normally select myself. I don't know where they're finding such huge broccoli crowns, but they're consistently doing so (we're ordering per crown, and paying per-pound, so the incentives are aligned there). On substitutions -- they require customer review of every substitution. (We take the errors in stride -- a global pandemic is a time that we can be glad to have such reliable high-quality food at all. The best fail was the day that Anjou pears got substituted in for garlic, but somebody found the garlic, so we got garlic too :).)
- altoidaltoid 6y ago
  Your local QFC is really a Kroger btw
  - alexilliamson 6y ago
    Maybe technically in terms of ownership, but the QFC brand stands from Kroger IMO. I've never felt such joy in a grocery store.
fossuser 6y ago
I would hope that grocery stores become warehouses and the only people allowed in are delivery. You could redesign the entire stores to optimize for this which could reduce the likeliness of damaged goods. Amazon would be in a good position to do this (the Whole Foods near me already has part of it set aside for something like this).
- wool_gather 6y ago
  This would be sort of funny, since many operated like this in the (not recent) past. Customers picking their own products off open shelves was an innovation at one point (and it was greeted by some people with similar disdain as our current self-checkout lines).
- twic 6y ago
  Where online shopping reaches sufficient scale, that happens: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_store https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_store
- philwelch 6y ago
  Amazon Fresh works this way already.
thomk 6y ago
This brings up another question in my mind. You are examining 10 apples, well, so is everyone else. So all that fresh fruit has been held, bare handed, by the person who picked it, the person who loaded it and x number of customers who've examined it. Not that ordering fruit online eliminates that problem but it seems like it would be a little more hygienic. One picker, one loader/examiner. Maybe we need a better way to see germs so we know when we are done removing germs.
- hombre_fatal 6y ago
  The solution is to simply wash your produce. I'm not sure how the examination can be done at a later time than picking. Either you want to pick it or you don't. And different people have different standards. The picker should just always choose the best available. Running low on selection is what naturally forces suboptimal picks.
  - mattkrause 6y ago
    It depends on what you want too. For eating as a snack, I want small-to-medium sized apples. For cooking, I'd rather have a few giant ones so the peeling is easier.
tzs 6y ago
I don't know how standardized layout is within a chain, but at my local Walmart superstore the area immediately to the right of the entrance closest to the grocery section is produce, baked goods, and deli. Just past that is the meat section. Immediately to the left of that entrance is check out, starting with a bunch of self-checkout stations. This makes it quite reasonable to do a quick extraction mission for produce and meat that has you in the store for only a few minutes, with good avoidance of other people. The interior of that section is just short low aisles that you can easily see over, and square tables of baked goods, so even if there are a few other people there it is usually easy to keep track of them and arrange to have an obstacle between you and them. My current approach is to get most of my groceries by their free contactless pickup service, and get produce and meat via in-store quick raids. If while on a produce raid I see that there aren't many people shopping and they are doing a good job with masks and distancing I might expand the mission to grab other things while I'm there.
- bobthepanda 6y ago
  Generally speaking, I find that at most supermarkets dairy, eggs and meat is at the back, because they are intentionally designed to make you walk through other things to try and squeeze in more purchases when things catch your eye. And this was true when I've lived in the NE and in the PNW.
- sjg007 6y ago
  I agree, I've actually found that Walmart has been the best online grocery experience. My local supermarket is Ok but HyVee has been wildly inconsistent.
- yellowapple 6y ago
  Yeah, pretty much every Walmart here in Reno is the same way, except sometimes they'll be flipped around (i.e. grocery area to the left instead of the right). Similar deal with Costco and Sam's.
hinkley 6y ago
You also can't substitute one brand of salsa for another. That'll start fights in some circles.
- klyrs 6y ago
  Recent substitutions I've seen (where I specified "no substitutions"): Ice cream flavors: my favorite for something I'd never pick (still ate it, annoyed) Margarine instead of butter -- the heck? Won't use it. Vanilla yogurt in place of plain yogurt. Slowly eating it for breakfast, annoyed; can't use it in savory dishes which is what it's for. Juices: I can't stand sugar alcohols, and got a ton of crap full of sucralose. Won't touch the stuff... Not to mention the half-rotten veggies that I'd never select for myself / won't survive a few days in the fridge.
  - hinkley 6y ago
    Not justifying it, but try dewatering the yogurt and see if that does anything for your savory dishes. I don't think I have the right gauge of strainer and end up using leftover coffee filters.
    - darrylb42 6y ago
      Dewatering is not going to remove the flavor and sugar in vanilla yogurt.
    - klyrs 6y ago
      It's the sugar and vanilla flavoring that I find offensive -- are you suggesting that both would be addressed by dewatering? I can imagine it taking care of the sugar (with several washings, I suppose?) since it's water soluble, but I think that the vanilla would be irredeemably dissolved into the milkfat. Alas, I've gone back to shopping due to these experiences, so I've got a tub of the good stuff already. So on one hand this is all academic, but you've caught my academic curiosity :)
      - hinkley 6y ago
nmstoker 6y ago
This is why I avoid online for fresh food, instead getting them to do the heavy lifting items and resilient commodities (eg they can't mess up a bag of flour, bottles of wine, beer, Coke etc; if they're damaged too badly they'll obviously be unable to supply them). Deselecting the substitution acceptable option is also wise. This was a major obvious flaw even back in 1999 when Shatner was pushing Priceline - obviously they'd have an incentive to pretend they had to substitute a certain percentage of the premium brand stuff for cheaper items and do it sparingly enough that they made more profit whilst trying not to lose you as a customer. My experience in the UK is that Ocado always tries to substitute items with a worse cost to weigh ratio - it's particularly silly because they think I won't notice (feels like they should detect that I'm focused and dial it back!)
- gramontblanc 6y ago
  Seems like a bold prediction that most (maybe any?) grocery stores have the level of corporate organization or even level of education to even consider a "secret order substitution to prole cart-pushers who will then have to answer customer service calls asking why their order was amended to add a more expensive item". Someone down the line has to actually act out the 'evil algorithm', and will then have to actually interact with the aggrieved customers. In a third party delivery service I imagine it would be trivially easy to get the line workers to betray the customer / rest of the organization, but there are also none of the incentives to, for example, try to dump low velocity items through deliberate substitution errors.
  - nmstoker 6y ago
    Maybe we have different experiences but you talk as if substitutions are not a regular part of the process - I'm not a massive delivery shopper but in the pre-Covid era it was almost unheard of to get a delivery without at least one item substituted when you forget to deselect substitution. I switch amongst three of the major chains and the experience is basically the same. Also I don't think your approach need be how it's enacted. You could quite easily run a set of adjustments against the restocking priories to see which had the least negative effect on profits and that would likely result in this kind of substitution the way it's observed. This wouldn't even need one to put on a "let's do evil hat", couched in these terms it comes across as perfectly reasonable.
skywhopper 6y ago
Yep. This has been our experience as well. Not only do the pickers have no incentive to do a good job (and often aren't even trained in how to judge the produce and meat they are selecting); and not only do mind-boggling substitutions take place sometimes; but in just about every online grocery order we've made in the past two months (so about 10 times by this point), we've gotten some items that were just plain wrongly chosen--ie we asked for one thing and got something entirely different that might have been nearby in the store, and was rung up as what we ordered, but we didn't actually get the item we ordered. Lots of these problems could be improved through better technology (there's a running joke on Twitter about accidentally ordering a single banana or fifty avocados, and it's amazing how truly bad the grocery websites are at representing what it is you're even ordering) and by optimizing the product selection for online ordering and delivery distribution (versus today where most grocery delivery seems to be done by store staff walking the store and building a cart by looking for the things on a print-out of the website order), but what grocery company is going to invest in those sorts of fundamental changes when the CW is that we'll be past this pandemic within a year or two at most?
- jandrese 6y ago
  Oh yeah. We tried the Costco delivery thing once, but discovered that the "substitutions allowed" option is basically "fuck my shit up Fam".
charwalker 6y ago
I'm super picky about my apples after growing up near an awesome apple orchard. I only buy a few types unless making a pie or similar. Each type has certain features I look at. I like eating crisp Fuji apples the most and usually only buy those based on coloring, shape, and the sound it makes when I pop it into my hand like one might a baseball into a baseball glove. The sound is critical to finding a crisp vs soft apple. No way I'm leaving fresh produce/meat selection to a random staffer, especially not apples.
darrylb42 6y ago
Not to mention expiry dates on products. A store is happy to give out a 12 pack of KD that expires tomorrow. Shopping myself I know it will take a couple months to finish and won't by something about to expire. I also won't pick defective packages. Both of these things happened ordering from Amazon before this crisis and I have not tried them since, or likely ever again.
stormdennis 6y ago
I always check use-by and best before dates. When milk can have a date that's over a week away, I really hate it when someone buys milk that's use by tomorrow. Same for for bread, cheese, eggs, butter, fruit and veg, any number of items. Supermarkets naturally want to sell you the soon to expire stuff so how can you trust their pickers? The answer might be buyers and deliverers independent from the shops.
- mattkrause 6y ago
  A lot of the use-by dates are more like quality suggestions or even outright marketing (how could salt go bad?!) https://www.nytimes.com/article/expiration-dates-coronavirus.html https://www.nytimes.com/article/expiration-dates-coronavirus...
  - stormdennis 6y ago
    You're right but, illogical or not, given a choice I'll always take the fresher one.
tonetheman 6y ago
This this this. In our area you cannot get good pickers. I am sure they are tired or bored or something... but it is most of the time not worth the hassle. So I get it... but it is not a good experience at all.
- sethhochberg 6y ago
  Tired, bored, or perhaps the reality is that the business model simply wouldn't work if the wages paid to Instacart shoppers were high enough that they could reliably get labor who cared. As-is it feels like a desperation gig and the results match.
xivzgrev 6y ago
Exactly. Online grocery ordering still has a significant problem: accurately delivering on a customer's wishes. It's a complicated problem. Customers have various "squishy" preferences - your bruised apples may be fine to me. Customers also have dietary restrictions that they just can't have. In-store inventory (esp fresh items) is constantly changing and may not be up to date. Items can easily look similar but are actually different in grabbing the wrong item or substituting. When you go to the store, you can get exactly what you want. Until that problem is solved, grocery delivery will always be a minority.
PretzelFisch 6y ago
Oh the automatic substitution non organic to organic is not much of an issue. But I have had food items like oatmeal auto replace with ice or a sponge. I don't know what is worse honestly the fact ai is so bad or that a real person will buy the insane replacement.
- hansvm 6y ago
  People are complicated though, even for seemingly safe issues like swapping non-organic for organic. I never make that substitution myself, except for the few times a year I'm shopping for somebody else who would make that substitution. As a consumer I don't enjoy paying higher prices for lower quality produce with an extra helping of e. coli, and it's frustrating to see disinformation campaigns demonizing GMOs while ignoring "organic" mutagenesis or trying to masquerade organic farms as being pesticide-free just because they use undisclosed/unregulated amounts of "natural" chemicals which repel/kill pests rather than regulated amounts of chemicals which are definitively classified as pesticides.
bsharitt 6y ago
I used Kroger's clicklist when it first started, and it was find but got worse. It wouldn't have been so bad if I got the occasional piece of produce or meat I would normally give a pass too, but as time when on, it started to seem like they were actively starting to dump their worst meats and produce on clicklist shoppers. I also found myself having to go inside the store almost every time to go get the items that were allegedly unavailable. In the end if I'm going to go inside anyway I might as well not pay the extra fee and not get the worst the meat and produce departments have to offer.
anjakefala 6y ago
They substituted veggie soup cubes with chicken ones. I am a vegetarian. :/
yellow_postit 6y ago
This was a point of price differentiation at some of the online grocery retailers I used while living in London. Some folks will be willing to pay more for “perfect” produce — even for bananas as an example there’s a need for a slider of green to yellow that is really relevant.
rs6 6y ago
My wife doesn't even like the produce I pick when I get produce and meats so it's unlikely some store person or contractor from a delivery service app will do the same.
herenorthere 6y ago
As a person who used to work in produce in the US, just wanted to say the visual image of a produce clerk dumping a box of apples to the display is ungodly. Where are you shopping? A few discount stores might do that, but there's no way any prominent stores do that. I mean, first of all, virtually all brands of apples don't just come loose in boxes, they are layered with cardboard trays. So you couldn't just dump them all out at once even if you wanted too. Unless you want to have cardboard trays flying everywhere. That's just not a simple or quick way to unload even if you are being careless!
adrianmonk 6y ago
About substitutions, I'm guessing they haven't explored what all they can do with that and there are probably some easy wins still available. Right now it seems to be pretty capricious and up to the whims of someone who is in a hurry and whose primary responsibility is pulling things from shelves. They could use software to make educated guesses. Random ideas: (1a) Allow customers to rate substitutions after the fact as bad, OK, or good. Then learn which substitutions customers generally like, and try to do those. The goal should probably be to avoid bad substitutions, so 10% bad / 60% OK / 30% good is preferable to 25% bad / 25% OK / 50% good. (1b) If I myself rated a substitution as bad in the past and you need to substitute for that same item again, try something different. (2) Look for safe choices in order history. If vanilla yogurt isn't available today, but blueberry and coconut are, and in the past I've bought cherry and blueberry yogurt several times but never coconut, then give me blueberry. (3) Get fancier and try to model features of products that a customer does and doesn't like. You've got metadata like keywords from product names, ingredient lists, brands, packaging type, and size. I bought this ice cream, those bagels, that coffee creamer, and that applesauce, and cinnamon is the common thread in all four. So when you're out of brown sugar oatmeal, give me cinnamon spice even though I've never bought that before because it looks like I like cinnamon. (4) Model based on similarity to other buyers. I often buy these 5 items, and someone else also buys those same 5 items, but they often buy a 6th one that I don't. So maybe I'd like that 6th product too as a substitute (provided it's already on the short list of reasonable substitutes).
- gregmac 6y ago
  I think substitutions are way, way more complex than that. Just from my own experience: I eat low carb (keto). Recently I had vanilla yogurt (22g carbs) substituted for Greek yogurt (5g carbs), which I basically can't eat. There's a handful of other things where the carbs can vary wildly between brands such as sausages, salad dressing, and BBQ sauce. Not to mention that many people think the "low fat" version of anything is basically interchangeable (reality: less fat, but 10x the carbs (sugar) to make up for it). My kid is allergic to peanuts. There's a shocking amount of things that "may contain peanuts or tree nuts" including things you wouldn't necessarily expect like pita breads, meatballs and chicken fingers. We stick to the same brands generally, but always read the label whenever buying something new. Food allergies are probably possible to handle (though you really do have to check everything), but I don't realistically expect the pickers to follow the more specific/crazy diet restrictions. We've only done online pickup a handful of times but have stopped allowing substitutions on most things for the above reasons.
2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago
I eat bruised apples. Who cares?
thayne 6y ago
> Now you have to consider the automatic substitution of equivalent items when something is out of stock or, as my local store handles it, simply not getting an item that is out of stock that I would be ok with a substitution.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
jasondigitized 6y ago
My wife and I use Shipt and we always get a guy named Matthew. If we order apples, Matthew takes the time to find the good apples. If he doesn't like the apples he will text my wife and ask if we want to nix the apples in our order. Matthew always gets a very generous tip and I think there is an opportunity for a service to take a white glove approach to grocery shopping that busy people will pay a premium for.
ahallock 6y ago
I agree that choosing in-person is better, but I find the experience good enough while keeping out of harm's way of the pandemic. A bruised apple is not going to ruin my day. Most delivery services I've used have a "don't substitute" option as well if you need that for sensitive items.
philwelch 6y ago
Doing home grocery delivery by hiring people to shop at the grocery store for you is like doing e-commerce by hiring people to go to the mall for you. Grocery stores are deliberately designed in the exact opposite way that fulfillment centers are; even “warehouse stores” like Costco are adapted to exploit consumer psychology rather than optimize picking throughput. I have never had substitution problems with Amazon Fresh because “substitute one ASIN for another” is an absurd use case if you can reliably track your inventory and allow people to choose products based on availability. I’ve also been pleased with meat and produce quality; maybe I’m lucky, or maybe grocers have been getting away with stocking shoddy produce for years on the expectation that the customer can do the QC work for them.

hvs 6y ago

We've been doing curbside pick up for groceries for the past few months and fresh food and produce are definitely the biggest problem with the substitutions being the second. The substitutions would probably be better/less often in more normal times, but the fresh food selection problem is always going to be there. For now we do it because our health is more important than our fruit quality, but we won't continue it when things achieve some level of normalcy again.

briefcomment 6y ago

Additionally, there have been times when perishables like non pasteurized juice, and milk have gone bad when I had them delivered. I realized that I do a good job of picking those items last during a trip to the store, and I drive home immediately afterwards, while the picker/delivery person is probably not incentivized to do the same.

karatestomp 6y ago

All those things, plus: 1) concern that prices online are higher so the delivery option's more expensive than it looks (food delivery services do this), 2) concern that some or all sale prices won't be used online—a lot of my shopping past my immediate needs consists of checking the canned and frozen sections for any actually good sales.

lostapathy 6y ago
This is why I’ve backed away from it. I don’t mind paying for delivery, but the fact that I oy both a direct few and a variable extra markup per item, and that markup seems to vary so much per item makes it hard to swallow for me. It just feels like scummy enough that I’ll go to the store. Give me an option where the cost of convenience is obvious and straightforward and I’d come back.
- hckr_news 6y ago
  Delivery fee + Tip also. Best option is probably pick up as you save some time without getting charged other fees or needing to to tip anyone.

bdcravens 6y ago

> Now you have to consider the automatic substitution of equivalent items when something is out of stock. My dibetic friend was telling yesterday that they substituted regular mt dew for his order of mt dew zero sugar. Typically you have the option to indicate that you do not want any substitutions.

alleyshack 6y ago
They don't always respect this. I've had multiple Instacart shoppers replace items without marking them as replacements, including replacing some of them with things I explicitly indicated I did not want as replacements.
- thejynxed 6y ago
  A company I do contract work for banned Instacart from one of their local stores entirely due to customer complaints to store management about unapproved substitutions.
  - wool_gather 6y ago
    Purely out of curiosity, how do the store police this? (I'm not very familiar with how Instacart operates, but I thought it was just a person going to the store as a normal shopper in your stead.)
    - applecrazy 6y ago
      I’m pretty sure the shoppers pay with a special card. They probably just tell the employees at the check out counter to refuse service to anyone with an Instacart branded credit card.
  - alleyshack 6y ago
    I'm curious what metrics are driving that behavior by Instacart shoppers. In my (entirely amateur/armchair) opinion, it would seem like the time you'd save by making an unapproved substitution wouldn't make up for the potential for negative reviews, which could get you driven off the platform entirely. Maybe a majority of customers don't care enough about unapproved substitutions to review poorly? Though reading through this thread suggests otherwise. Maybe there's some other internal metrics which shoppers or Instacart have access to that incentivize poor substitutions in the name of speed? Honest questions - I don't know anything about this business and it's interesting to me that it appears to be such a pervasive issue.

asiachick 6y ago

i think you're right. It's certainly my opinion that I don't want a USA store clerk picking my produce. On the other hand here in Japan most produce is much more cared for, probably to the detriment of the environment but still, far less bruised or bad produce. And yet, AFAIK, it's the same in Japan. People don't seem to want to order their groceries. Which makes me wonder if there aren't other reasons. One is that there's no good way to deliver. You have to be home to receive. They can't put your milk, butter, yogurt, ice cream some locker. You have to be home to receive, at least for people the commute to work, means it pretty much has to come between 6pm and 10pm. How many grocery delivery services can handle that? -- On the other hand, my mom says she's driving to the grocery store and everyone is doing pickup. The groceries are already chosen and packed up, you just drive up your car and the load the bag. So if that's true then people are willing to let others choose the produce.

Enginerrrd 6y ago
I'm inclined to agree. I think you're up against some deeply rooted human behaviors of wanting to sift through and gather/select their food. Those behaviors rapidly scale based on hunger... but frankly, no one in the income bracket that can afford to buy their food online ever gets really hungry in today's world.

kerkeslager 6y ago

Playing devil's advocate: an enormous amount of food waste is caused by people simply refusing to buy ugly food. It's literally less wasteful to shave off most of a carrot so that it's a baby carrot, than to try to sell the same carrots as-is. There's nothing wrong with the ugly carrots--but they'll rot on the shelves. Bruised apples are perfectly edible. Maybe you just don't like them, and that's fine--there's no accounting for taste. But I don't think it's outlandish for someone to give you a bruised apple. Broken bones in chicken aren't harmful--the traditional way of preparing jerk chicken involves chopping the chicken with a knife that just cleaves through the bones. Again, your preference here is valid, but it's your preference, not something that's objectively better. And these are some of the less extreme examples--being involved in my local CSA, I've heard people complain about potatoes with dirt on them, and literally heard someone refuse to buy eggs because they farmer got them from her own chickens. A lot of people's preferences around food aren't just arbitrary, they're downright illogical. Substitutions and expired food are obviously problematic--there's lots of room for delivery services to do better. But I am not convinced that the average person does a much better job selecting their food based on "quality".

simonebrunozzi 6y ago
Check out Imperfect Foods (I am not affiliated; simply a happy customer) - they send you a box with "imperfect" food that otherwise would have gone to waste. There are also other similar companies doing this.
denimnerd42 6y ago
You don't get any discount in this case though. You're still paying $2-3/lb for bruised apples that are like you said literally waste at that point and $2-5/lb for chicken that if you picked out yourself would be of higher quality. Even if they did give you a price break for lower quality food. They'd still do things like give you a pineapple that will never ripen before it rots like we received last week.
- kerkeslager 6y ago
  What I'm saying is that your perception of quality is not actually objective quality.

basseq 6y ago

Even if quality is there, how ripe do you want? Are you going to use those avocados tonight, or later in the week? Do you like green bananas or ones that are turning brown? Let alone the "what looks good today?" or "what's on sale today?" method of shopping! Even packaged goods are tough. When I'm in a store, I know quickly which product I want. I may not remember the brand name, but I can scan the shelf and find it. Online, I have to sort through a myriad of options, not to mention sizes and variants. BBQ sauce, for instance, returns 58 results on Peapod. Sweet Baby Ray's, which I like, is 22 of those. There are 13 different variants (original, hickory & brown sugar, honey, buffalo sauce, sweet'n spicy, honey mustard, honey teriyaki, sweet teriyaki, sweet vidalia onion, maple, sweet chili glaze, honey chipotle, no sugar added) and 7 different sizes (14oz, 16oz, 18oz, 18.5oz, 28oz, 40oz, 80oz). Holy crap! I know what the label looks like, and I know the bottle is about yea-big. The images online are 200x200... I can barely SEE the label. Then, what if what I want isn't in stock? Is it going to appear on the page? Am I just not going to get it? Would I get a substitute, as I might if I was in the store? By the time I do that mental exercise for 50 items, I might as well drive to the store. These are hard challenges. One thing that might make a difference is integration with club cards. Giant knows what I buy down to frequency and UPC. Why haven't they done better integration to link my in-person buying with encouraging me to buy the same items online?

Ididntdothis 6y ago
"Let alone the "what looks good today?" or "what's on sale today?" method of shopping!" That one is really important with fresh food. Maybe the lettuce looks good or the cucumbers, who knows?
ISL 6y ago
For me, the wish is for scripting. Most of my buying is algorithmic, but the filters don't match my algorithms. It is difficult to express, "Please give me the cereal that I like the most that is under $X/lb. If there is an exceptional deal, buy more." without an API or scripting.
- basseq 6y ago
  Which, if you break it down further: 1. Everyone's "algorithm" is different. Even if you could bake every possible filter into your eGrocery product, can you imagine the UX nightmare? 2. The "that I like the most" is a tough thing to quantify. Who is "I"? Me? My wife? My kids? My mom who's coming to visit this weekend? What do I like? Specific brands? Things I've bought before? From that store, or a different one? Things I might like because they share characteristics?

ISL 6y ago

Our local store, QFC in Seattle, has been doing a great job of selecting produce for our curbside delivery. Quality has matched or beaten what I normally select myself. I don't know where they're finding such huge broccoli crowns, but they're consistently doing so (we're ordering per crown, and paying per-pound, so the incentives are aligned there). On substitutions -- they require customer review of every substitution. (We take the errors in stride -- a global pandemic is a time that we can be glad to have such reliable high-quality food at all. The best fail was the day that Anjou pears got substituted in for garlic, but somebody found the garlic, so we got garlic too :).)

altoidaltoid 6y ago
Your local QFC is really a Kroger btw
- alexilliamson 6y ago
  Maybe technically in terms of ownership, but the QFC brand stands from Kroger IMO. I've never felt such joy in a grocery store.

fossuser 6y ago

I would hope that grocery stores become warehouses and the only people allowed in are delivery. You could redesign the entire stores to optimize for this which could reduce the likeliness of damaged goods. Amazon would be in a good position to do this (the Whole Foods near me already has part of it set aside for something like this).

wool_gather 6y ago
This would be sort of funny, since many operated like this in the (not recent) past. Customers picking their own products off open shelves was an innovation at one point (and it was greeted by some people with similar disdain as our current self-checkout lines).
twic 6y ago
Where online shopping reaches sufficient scale, that happens: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_store https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_store
philwelch 6y ago
Amazon Fresh works this way already.

thomk 6y ago

This brings up another question in my mind. You are examining 10 apples, well, so is everyone else. So all that fresh fruit has been held, bare handed, by the person who picked it, the person who loaded it and x number of customers who've examined it. Not that ordering fruit online eliminates that problem but it seems like it would be a little more hygienic. One picker, one loader/examiner. Maybe we need a better way to see germs so we know when we are done removing germs.

hombre_fatal 6y ago
The solution is to simply wash your produce. I'm not sure how the examination can be done at a later time than picking. Either you want to pick it or you don't. And different people have different standards. The picker should just always choose the best available. Running low on selection is what naturally forces suboptimal picks.
- mattkrause 6y ago
  It depends on what you want too. For eating as a snack, I want small-to-medium sized apples. For cooking, I'd rather have a few giant ones so the peeling is easier.

tzs 6y ago

I don't know how standardized layout is within a chain, but at my local Walmart superstore the area immediately to the right of the entrance closest to the grocery section is produce, baked goods, and deli. Just past that is the meat section. Immediately to the left of that entrance is check out, starting with a bunch of self-checkout stations. This makes it quite reasonable to do a quick extraction mission for produce and meat that has you in the store for only a few minutes, with good avoidance of other people. The interior of that section is just short low aisles that you can easily see over, and square tables of baked goods, so even if there are a few other people there it is usually easy to keep track of them and arrange to have an obstacle between you and them. My current approach is to get most of my groceries by their free contactless pickup service, and get produce and meat via in-store quick raids. If while on a produce raid I see that there aren't many people shopping and they are doing a good job with masks and distancing I might expand the mission to grab other things while I'm there.

bobthepanda 6y ago
Generally speaking, I find that at most supermarkets dairy, eggs and meat is at the back, because they are intentionally designed to make you walk through other things to try and squeeze in more purchases when things catch your eye. And this was true when I've lived in the NE and in the PNW.
sjg007 6y ago
I agree, I've actually found that Walmart has been the best online grocery experience. My local supermarket is Ok but HyVee has been wildly inconsistent.
yellowapple 6y ago
Yeah, pretty much every Walmart here in Reno is the same way, except sometimes they'll be flipped around (i.e. grocery area to the left instead of the right). Similar deal with Costco and Sam's.

hinkley 6y ago

You also can't substitute one brand of salsa for another. That'll start fights in some circles.

klyrs 6y ago
Recent substitutions I've seen (where I specified "no substitutions"): Ice cream flavors: my favorite for something I'd never pick (still ate it, annoyed) Margarine instead of butter -- the heck? Won't use it. Vanilla yogurt in place of plain yogurt. Slowly eating it for breakfast, annoyed; can't use it in savory dishes which is what it's for. Juices: I can't stand sugar alcohols, and got a ton of crap full of sucralose. Won't touch the stuff... Not to mention the half-rotten veggies that I'd never select for myself / won't survive a few days in the fridge.
- hinkley 6y ago
  Not justifying it, but try dewatering the yogurt and see if that does anything for your savory dishes. I don't think I have the right gauge of strainer and end up using leftover coffee filters.
  - darrylb42 6y ago
    Dewatering is not going to remove the flavor and sugar in vanilla yogurt.
  - klyrs 6y ago
    It's the sugar and vanilla flavoring that I find offensive -- are you suggesting that both would be addressed by dewatering? I can imagine it taking care of the sugar (with several washings, I suppose?) since it's water soluble, but I think that the vanilla would be irredeemably dissolved into the milkfat. Alas, I've gone back to shopping due to these experiences, so I've got a tub of the good stuff already. So on one hand this is all academic, but you've caught my academic curiosity :)
    - hinkley 6y ago

nmstoker 6y ago

This is why I avoid online for fresh food, instead getting them to do the heavy lifting items and resilient commodities (eg they can't mess up a bag of flour, bottles of wine, beer, Coke etc; if they're damaged too badly they'll obviously be unable to supply them). Deselecting the substitution acceptable option is also wise. This was a major obvious flaw even back in 1999 when Shatner was pushing Priceline - obviously they'd have an incentive to pretend they had to substitute a certain percentage of the premium brand stuff for cheaper items and do it sparingly enough that they made more profit whilst trying not to lose you as a customer. My experience in the UK is that Ocado always tries to substitute items with a worse cost to weigh ratio - it's particularly silly because they think I won't notice (feels like they should detect that I'm focused and dial it back!)

gramontblanc 6y ago
Seems like a bold prediction that most (maybe any?) grocery stores have the level of corporate organization or even level of education to even consider a "secret order substitution to prole cart-pushers who will then have to answer customer service calls asking why their order was amended to add a more expensive item". Someone down the line has to actually act out the 'evil algorithm', and will then have to actually interact with the aggrieved customers. In a third party delivery service I imagine it would be trivially easy to get the line workers to betray the customer / rest of the organization, but there are also none of the incentives to, for example, try to dump low velocity items through deliberate substitution errors.
- nmstoker 6y ago
  Maybe we have different experiences but you talk as if substitutions are not a regular part of the process - I'm not a massive delivery shopper but in the pre-Covid era it was almost unheard of to get a delivery without at least one item substituted when you forget to deselect substitution. I switch amongst three of the major chains and the experience is basically the same. Also I don't think your approach need be how it's enacted. You could quite easily run a set of adjustments against the restocking priories to see which had the least negative effect on profits and that would likely result in this kind of substitution the way it's observed. This wouldn't even need one to put on a "let's do evil hat", couched in these terms it comes across as perfectly reasonable.

skywhopper 6y ago

Yep. This has been our experience as well. Not only do the pickers have no incentive to do a good job (and often aren't even trained in how to judge the produce and meat they are selecting); and not only do mind-boggling substitutions take place sometimes; but in just about every online grocery order we've made in the past two months (so about 10 times by this point), we've gotten some items that were just plain wrongly chosen--ie we asked for one thing and got something entirely different that might have been nearby in the store, and was rung up as what we ordered, but we didn't actually get the item we ordered. Lots of these problems could be improved through better technology (there's a running joke on Twitter about accidentally ordering a single banana or fifty avocados, and it's amazing how truly bad the grocery websites are at representing what it is you're even ordering) and by optimizing the product selection for online ordering and delivery distribution (versus today where most grocery delivery seems to be done by store staff walking the store and building a cart by looking for the things on a print-out of the website order), but what grocery company is going to invest in those sorts of fundamental changes when the CW is that we'll be past this pandemic within a year or two at most?

jandrese 6y ago
Oh yeah. We tried the Costco delivery thing once, but discovered that the "substitutions allowed" option is basically "fuck my shit up Fam".

charwalker 6y ago

I'm super picky about my apples after growing up near an awesome apple orchard. I only buy a few types unless making a pie or similar. Each type has certain features I look at. I like eating crisp Fuji apples the most and usually only buy those based on coloring, shape, and the sound it makes when I pop it into my hand like one might a baseball into a baseball glove. The sound is critical to finding a crisp vs soft apple. No way I'm leaving fresh produce/meat selection to a random staffer, especially not apples.

darrylb42 6y ago

Not to mention expiry dates on products. A store is happy to give out a 12 pack of KD that expires tomorrow. Shopping myself I know it will take a couple months to finish and won't by something about to expire. I also won't pick defective packages. Both of these things happened ordering from Amazon before this crisis and I have not tried them since, or likely ever again.

stormdennis 6y ago

I always check use-by and best before dates. When milk can have a date that's over a week away, I really hate it when someone buys milk that's use by tomorrow. Same for for bread, cheese, eggs, butter, fruit and veg, any number of items. Supermarkets naturally want to sell you the soon to expire stuff so how can you trust their pickers? The answer might be buyers and deliverers independent from the shops.

mattkrause 6y ago
A lot of the use-by dates are more like quality suggestions or even outright marketing (how could salt go bad?!) https://www.nytimes.com/article/expiration-dates-coronavirus.html https://www.nytimes.com/article/expiration-dates-coronavirus...
- stormdennis 6y ago
  You're right but, illogical or not, given a choice I'll always take the fresher one.

tonetheman 6y ago

This this this. In our area you cannot get good pickers. I am sure they are tired or bored or something... but it is most of the time not worth the hassle. So I get it... but it is not a good experience at all.

sethhochberg 6y ago
Tired, bored, or perhaps the reality is that the business model simply wouldn't work if the wages paid to Instacart shoppers were high enough that they could reliably get labor who cared. As-is it feels like a desperation gig and the results match.

xivzgrev 6y ago

Exactly. Online grocery ordering still has a significant problem: accurately delivering on a customer's wishes. It's a complicated problem. Customers have various "squishy" preferences - your bruised apples may be fine to me. Customers also have dietary restrictions that they just can't have. In-store inventory (esp fresh items) is constantly changing and may not be up to date. Items can easily look similar but are actually different in grabbing the wrong item or substituting. When you go to the store, you can get exactly what you want. Until that problem is solved, grocery delivery will always be a minority.

PretzelFisch 6y ago

Oh the automatic substitution non organic to organic is not much of an issue. But I have had food items like oatmeal auto replace with ice or a sponge. I don't know what is worse honestly the fact ai is so bad or that a real person will buy the insane replacement.

hansvm 6y ago
People are complicated though, even for seemingly safe issues like swapping non-organic for organic. I never make that substitution myself, except for the few times a year I'm shopping for somebody else who would make that substitution. As a consumer I don't enjoy paying higher prices for lower quality produce with an extra helping of e. coli, and it's frustrating to see disinformation campaigns demonizing GMOs while ignoring "organic" mutagenesis or trying to masquerade organic farms as being pesticide-free just because they use undisclosed/unregulated amounts of "natural" chemicals which repel/kill pests rather than regulated amounts of chemicals which are definitively classified as pesticides.

bsharitt 6y ago

I used Kroger's clicklist when it first started, and it was find but got worse. It wouldn't have been so bad if I got the occasional piece of produce or meat I would normally give a pass too, but as time when on, it started to seem like they were actively starting to dump their worst meats and produce on clicklist shoppers. I also found myself having to go inside the store almost every time to go get the items that were allegedly unavailable. In the end if I'm going to go inside anyway I might as well not pay the extra fee and not get the worst the meat and produce departments have to offer.

anjakefala 6y ago

They substituted veggie soup cubes with chicken ones. I am a vegetarian. :/

yellow_postit 6y ago

This was a point of price differentiation at some of the online grocery retailers I used while living in London. Some folks will be willing to pay more for “perfect” produce — even for bananas as an example there’s a need for a slider of green to yellow that is really relevant.

rs6 6y ago

My wife doesn't even like the produce I pick when I get produce and meats so it's unlikely some store person or contractor from a delivery service app will do the same.

herenorthere 6y ago

As a person who used to work in produce in the US, just wanted to say the visual image of a produce clerk dumping a box of apples to the display is ungodly. Where are you shopping? A few discount stores might do that, but there's no way any prominent stores do that. I mean, first of all, virtually all brands of apples don't just come loose in boxes, they are layered with cardboard trays. So you couldn't just dump them all out at once even if you wanted too. Unless you want to have cardboard trays flying everywhere. That's just not a simple or quick way to unload even if you are being careless!

adrianmonk 6y ago

About substitutions, I'm guessing they haven't explored what all they can do with that and there are probably some easy wins still available. Right now it seems to be pretty capricious and up to the whims of someone who is in a hurry and whose primary responsibility is pulling things from shelves. They could use software to make educated guesses. Random ideas: (1a) Allow customers to rate substitutions after the fact as bad, OK, or good. Then learn which substitutions customers generally like, and try to do those. The goal should probably be to avoid bad substitutions, so 10% bad / 60% OK / 30% good is preferable to 25% bad / 25% OK / 50% good. (1b) If I myself rated a substitution as bad in the past and you need to substitute for that same item again, try something different. (2) Look for safe choices in order history. If vanilla yogurt isn't available today, but blueberry and coconut are, and in the past I've bought cherry and blueberry yogurt several times but never coconut, then give me blueberry. (3) Get fancier and try to model features of products that a customer does and doesn't like. You've got metadata like keywords from product names, ingredient lists, brands, packaging type, and size. I bought this ice cream, those bagels, that coffee creamer, and that applesauce, and cinnamon is the common thread in all four. So when you're out of brown sugar oatmeal, give me cinnamon spice even though I've never bought that before because it looks like I like cinnamon. (4) Model based on similarity to other buyers. I often buy these 5 items, and someone else also buys those same 5 items, but they often buy a 6th one that I don't. So maybe I'd like that 6th product too as a substitute (provided it's already on the short list of reasonable substitutes).

gregmac 6y ago
I think substitutions are way, way more complex than that. Just from my own experience: I eat low carb (keto). Recently I had vanilla yogurt (22g carbs) substituted for Greek yogurt (5g carbs), which I basically can't eat. There's a handful of other things where the carbs can vary wildly between brands such as sausages, salad dressing, and BBQ sauce. Not to mention that many people think the "low fat" version of anything is basically interchangeable (reality: less fat, but 10x the carbs (sugar) to make up for it). My kid is allergic to peanuts. There's a shocking amount of things that "may contain peanuts or tree nuts" including things you wouldn't necessarily expect like pita breads, meatballs and chicken fingers. We stick to the same brands generally, but always read the label whenever buying something new. Food allergies are probably possible to handle (though you really do have to check everything), but I don't realistically expect the pickers to follow the more specific/crazy diet restrictions. We've only done online pickup a handful of times but have stopped allowing substitutions on most things for the above reasons.

2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago

I eat bruised apples. Who cares?

thayne 6y ago

> Now you have to consider the automatic substitution of equivalent items when something is out of stock or, as my local store handles it, simply not getting an item that is out of stock that I would be ok with a substitution.

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jasondigitized 6y ago

My wife and I use Shipt and we always get a guy named Matthew. If we order apples, Matthew takes the time to find the good apples. If he doesn't like the apples he will text my wife and ask if we want to nix the apples in our order. Matthew always gets a very generous tip and I think there is an opportunity for a service to take a white glove approach to grocery shopping that busy people will pay a premium for.

ahallock 6y ago

I agree that choosing in-person is better, but I find the experience good enough while keeping out of harm's way of the pandemic. A bruised apple is not going to ruin my day. Most delivery services I've used have a "don't substitute" option as well if you need that for sensitive items.

philwelch 6y ago

Doing home grocery delivery by hiring people to shop at the grocery store for you is like doing e-commerce by hiring people to go to the mall for you. Grocery stores are deliberately designed in the exact opposite way that fulfillment centers are; even “warehouse stores” like Costco are adapted to exploit consumer psychology rather than optimize picking throughput. I have never had substitution problems with Amazon Fresh because “substitute one ASIN for another” is an absurd use case if you can reliably track your inventory and allow people to choose products based on availability. I’ve also been pleased with meat and produce quality; maybe I’m lucky, or maybe grocers have been getting away with stocking shoddy produce for years on the expectation that the customer can do the QC work for them.