So I am indulging my Diet Coke addiction by ordering 2 liter bottles. Usually I get my deliveries from Giant but they consider $1.99 to be a sale price and Walmart charges $1.69. So I ordered 6 bottles. I usually check no substitutions but I apparently forgot. They only had 3 bottles so they substituted the other three. Now I could see them replacing them with 2 liter bottles of Coke Zero, or even Diet Pepsi. What they did was to replace them with 20 ounce bottles of Diet Coke. Not a problem, obviously since it is the same product only less than 1/3 the amount (20 ounces vs 67 ounces). Here’s the kicker though. They charged me $1.69 each for the 20 ounce bottles! Yes, in their minds giving me a bottle with less than 1/3 the amount for the same price is an appropriate substitution. I blame myself for not putting no substitutions, but I will definitely be more careful in the future.
My head is esploding.
I once visited a store in New York where the price for one T-shirt was listed as $3.99, but if one were to buy two shirts, it would cost…$10.
I do hope that was a verbal flub by the cashier/associate, though, not an actual policy.
Mine too. Here is what can happen here in Romania: If they can’t find the exact items you have ordered, the actual guy picking them from the shelves will call you on the phone and tell you what s/he can find as replacement. There is always an amiable solution. It may sound too good to be real, but it actually happens. During this pandemic, people seem to be learning new skills around here.
I usually do pickup instead of delivery, but walmart tells you what they are substituting in advance and when you pick up you have a chance to reject the substitution. They tried to substitute spinach for pumpkin yesterday and I told them no.
I thought they did the same thing for delivery.
So yeah, absolutely stupid substitution but you should have had a chance to stop it. I think you can also go online afterwards and tell them that it wasn’t acceptable.
Sounds like a glitch to me. I would contact the and get it straightened out. I always put “No substitutions,” so I won’t get a non-kosher brand instead of a kosher brand.
Anyway, once they delivered Diet Coke to me instead of Coke Zero, which was probably an honest mistake-- the shopper was just having a hectic day and grabbed the wrong thing. But when I was asked to rate them, I gave them less than perfect, and so got taken to a screen where I was asked to describe my problem, so I did. Then I was asked if I wanted to “return” the product. Well, no, that sounded like a hassle, but I thought maybe they’d pick it up, so I said yes, thinking I could always change my mind, if they wanted me to shlep in it.
A screen popped up saying they’d refunded my “payment source” the money for the incorrect product, but they didn’t actually want it back, and it was mine to keep.
I suspect your shopper just forgot to plug in the substitution, and that charging you the same amount is not policy.
Unless they came out of the cold case. Sometimes the stuff from the cold case is way expensive-- nonetheless, if you were unhappy with the substitution, you should be able to return it.
In the UK Tesco are often over-generous with their substitutions. Last week i ordered a small bag of broccoli florets. They didn’t have it so substituted it for THREE full heads of broccoli (i was handing out broccoli to friends she family). Another time I ordered a 1kg box of cereal that was on sale at half price. They substituted it for 2 x 750g boxes so i got a really good deal on that. They let you refuse the substitutions at the door though. No doubt a phone call will sort that error out for you. You should never lose out financially if a store cannot fulfill your order.
Update. I went on their website and asked to “return” the product since the substitution was not to my liking. They refunded the money but told me I could dispose of the product or use it if I preferred. Now I actually feel a little bad about getting the soda for free. I also went on their website to check the actual prices which were as follows:
2 liter bottle $1.69
1 liter bottle $1.08
20 ounce bottle $1.88
Apparently they had given me a discount on the 20 ounce bottles. It is just so weird seeing them lined up on my counter and knowing that the mini bottles cost more than the big ones.
Anyway, I will probably drink it so maybe I should have paid for it, especially since the last time I ordered they threw in a cabbage that I hadn’t wanted (if you are in Northern Virginia and are missing a cabbage, it was sent to me by mistake and I’m sorry about your coleslaw).
Just to add, I now feel half like Alice through the looking glass where the bottles have shrunk but the prices have not, and half like an annoying Karen who is just trying to score some free soda.
You’re feeling bad about costing Walmart a buck or two?
Are you a monk? Or Mother Theresa Mr. Rogers Abraham Lincoln Keanu Luther King, Jedi Monk? That was .0000000001 second of revenue for them.
Said another way, they were having a super sale on 2L bottles.
The converse is also often true. e.g. the 24 pack costs 5 times the 6-pack price, not just 4. There is a VAST amount of that in retailing. People were conditioned back in the Olde Tymes that bigger = cheaper by the each. Retailers now exploit that assumption all the time.
The OP implies that this is the “regular” rather than sale price on 2 Liters. I also wonder if the 20 oz’ers were from the mini fridges near the checkout for impulse buyers who want a cold soda to drink right away.
I disallow substitutions on my Walmart orders. They just cannot seem to come up with a reasonable alternate. One time, someone thought an appropriate sub for the sugar-free pudding mix I’d requested would be unflavored gelatin. Say WHAT?
I do allow substitutions on Instacart, since there I can specify the acceptable alternate item (dunno why Walmart doesn’t have the sense to implement such a feature, since it obviously works rather well).
I remember as a kid when we were on vacation and ate at a coffeeshop, waiting with Dad as he paid at the counter, and seeing a box of peppermint patties with a sign
10¢ each – 2 for a quarter
I figured they spelled out ‘quarter’ to make the math harder.
My local store (Winn-Dixie FTR) seems to have raised this to a high art. if there are 4 name brands of TP, one shelf tag will show the “price per each” by the roll, another by the linear foot, another by the square inch, and another by the perforated square.
So it’s impossible to use those numbers to make the easy “who’s cheapest?” comparison the government intended when it mandated that price per each be disclosed on shelf tags.
They even do the same thing within brands between package sizes or multi-packs. If, e.g., a particular brand, size, and style of paper towel is available as a single roll pack, a 2 pack, a 3 pack, or a 6-pack, they’ll each use a different “per each” measure to stymie picking the cheapest choice.
Bastids.
Old Mad Magazine cartoon (quoted only approximately from memory): the customer says, “Ha, I got you! Here are two dimes, and I get two for twenty cents!”
After he’s gone, the cashier smiles. “Before I put up the sign, people would only buy one at a time. Now they buy two.”
I guess Dixie Winns that one.
snicker Well, I would end up doing something for dessert that required gelling - done such silly stuuff as gelling Knudsen’s 100% cranberry juice [2 oz to 8 oz water, using the water to dissolve the gel, and then the ice to gel it trick, using splenda to sweeten it to taste. Basically turning my normal beverage into jello] I have made coffee jello, sweet tea jello and done an egg in aspic garnished with snips of other stuff to decorate it by gelling chicken stock. You can even use gelatin to jell chocolate milk in a sort of mock pudding.
My husband once did Gatorade gelatin, and said he liked how it came out (I didn’t try it, not being partial to Gatorade). It was disappointing to him when we didn’t get the sugar-free cheesecake pudding, though. Fortunately, Amazon came through.
But one can make one’s own sugar free cheesecake - you can even make it no bake - I have a friend who makes it in tupperish plastic bowls because he doesn’t like the graham cracker crust.