Do you prefer to visit the supermarket rather than shop online?

Waitrose do Mixed Beans in a Spicy Tomato Sauce. They don’t have a lot of flavour and are not particularly spicy, but they are low sugar. So we can add a dash of whatever flavour we want to them – tomato, brown or bbq sauce whatever takes our fancy and that makes them better than many others on the market.

The thing is though, I have never found them in a Waitrose supermarket !!! They only seem to be available from Ocado.

On balance, Gareth, I would expect home delivery by van to be more environmentally positive than using a car for a two-way journey, so your decision is commendable. Is what you lose on prices more or less than what it would cost you to drive to an Aldi or Lidl store?

I don’t think home delivery is on the horizon with Aldi or Lidl as it does not fit their streamlined business model and most of their stores are of the wrong scale to support the logistics of a delivery service by van: the longer the distance between drops the fewer they can make in one day. The economics of van delivery are closely linked to urban areas and, for the major supermarkets, the marginal impact of an extra drop on an existing operation.

Hmmm…so two of us live in Snowdonia, then. Getting crowded up here…

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It’s the staff they employ that take things from the shelves to be delivered to you not the supermarket .You have a choice If you do not like one store there are other who will welcome your custom Don’t moan complain to the store (manager) of buy elsewhere Delivery drives will wait while yo check if they don’t ” vote with your feet ” as before

We are quite satisfied with Sainsbury’s on-line delivery service but mainly use it for basics, commodities and provisions. We also stipulate ‘no substitutions’ for the reasons you have given. This can mean some ordered items being missing but that is only a temporary problem.

We found Waitrose the worst for stock levels and substitutions so again have stopped them from substituting as they got it wrong twice as often as they got it right. It seems that the company has a sophisticated market and products to suit, but the staff who do the order-picking do not have the right degree of knowledge and experience; if the substitutions are driven by their computer system then the problem goes further back up the delivery chain to head office presumably. In the store the staff seem well-trained and quite knowledgable about their products but the delivery function is seen more as a warehousing and trucking operation where the skill-sets are not compatible with the customers’ expectations. Our main complaint with Waitrose is that they don’t seem to have any mechanism for ensuring that goods in the on-line order pipeline are available or held for delivery on the specified day; their stock levels appear to be driven by sales in-store with little reference to the on-line order book.

We don’t all have a choice of supermarket deliveries, Bishbut – in some rural areas coverage is patchy.

I have complained to the Waitrose management but received evasive, defensive or otherwise unsatisfactory answers. We rarely use their delivery service now and go to the store where we can see the range of possible alternatives and select accordingly.

I know that John but some complain to those who cannot do anything to help but never complain to the right person and will not do anything but complain time after time about the same thing Not just one thing either complain but do nothing else all the time

Michael Cook: Sainsburys – in line with Waitrose, Asda and others – inform you before delivery and upon delivery if you have any subs and what those subs are. That gives you plenty of time to reject the subs and the drivers certainly will wait for you to check your order.

In any case, if you find something is missing later, then you simply contact the Customer services who unfailingly refund your money and usually let you keep anything you’ve been sent by mistake.

Last week, I had ordered a 64 pack of Quantum dishwasher tables, an offer for £10. The store had run out – unsurprisingly – but they substituted it with a pack of only 45 tablets, but for the same price. Since they’d informed me by email prior to delivery I was able to tell the driver I was rejecting it, but he simply reduced the price to zero and let me keep the pack. Impeccable service, in my view.

Do Ocado deliver to your area John? They deliver to Norwich but not Great Yarmouth or Cromer. I rarely get substitutions or missing items and the driver always points them out and asks if I want to keep them. You also get advance warning in an email and mobile phone, so no surprise at the door unlike Asda who turned up with 28 out of 59 items missing.

https://www.ocado.com/webshop/postcodeCheck.do

If they are not in your area, you can register your interest and get a substantial discount off your first order, so worth trying them once.

Thank you Alfa. I thought of Ocado but at the moment they don’t serve our area. As I said, we are quite satisfied with Sainsbury’s and like a lot of their own label products. They do provide a good delivery service with only a very small percentage of items not delivered because of our refusal to accept substitutions – we might relent on that as they seem to have improved over the last year or so and become more intelligent about what customers want. As Ian has said, their drivers are polite and helpful and are usually early within the delivery slot which is useful because you can then get back on with things.