Quote:
Originally Posted by Maggy
Substitutions with Asda online shopping. Lemon Sherberts replaced with boiled mint sweets? Frylight sunflower oil spray for Frylight butter spray?Wholemeal rolls for white rolls when I ALREADY had ordered white rolls. So many substitutions for items that were in stock when I ordered them last night.
However I'm just not up to to going to do a big shop these days.It's too heavy on my back and arms.And yes I could tick no substitutions but I reckon I could end up with nothing at that rate.
I guess that the pickers are just not paid enough to care about providing a service for the elderly,infirm and disabled.  |
There are two reasons why that happens:
Firstly and foremost the pickers cannot manually override substitutions. They used to be able to substitute an item for whatever they wanted to right off the bat it something was out of stock. If for example you were obviously vegetarian based on what had already been picked for you (e.g. no meat items and loads of Quorn) and you ordered an Asda Cheese and Tomato pizza and it was out of stock, the picker can choose to substitute it with a Goodfellas Cheese and Tomato pizza. The problem with this is that whilst it is great for the customer who is paying the same price, the store/company has to absorb the cost and when you look at home shopping sales on a weekly basis you are looking at ten of thousands of £££ across the business just in substitutions. You might think "well Asda can afford it" but home shopping hardly makes any money at all because the money you pay for delivery doesn't cover the cost to pay someone to pick your items, load it onto a van, pay for someone to bring it to pay, for the fuel, pay for vehicle maintenance, the IT stuff for it all to run etc. It takes a massive chunk out of the profit margin and drops it from 30% for a normal customers shopping to 5% for home shopping. If you start substituting stuff willy nilly and giving people Andrex toilet rolls instead of Smart Price then you are losing money.
So bearing this in mind, Asda updated their software a couple of years ago so that it "suggests" (basically tells you) a substitution in the event that your selected item is out of stock. In the example I gave above, if your Asda cheese and tomato pizza was out of stock, it would then tell them to substitute it with meat feast, and if that was out of stock it would cycle through peperoni, ham & pineapple and the entire range trying to give you something for the same price so it doesn't cost the company any more money and potentially another £1/£1.50 for a Goodfellas pizza. Once those options are exhausted as a last ditch effort the picker has an option to provide a manual substitution but at this point it has already taken too long cycling through the options and waiting for each screen to load.
The pickers have to pick 180+ items per hour which is one item every 20 seconds minimum. That time allowance (which is strictly monitored and scored) doesn't provide for them going through that substitution process and giving you something sensible and an equivalent for what you ordered. Statistically the majority of people who have substitutions are content in keeping them (regardless of whether they like them or just cant be bothered to return them) so Asda's attitude is to substitute it with anything so they still get the money off you, knowing that there is a good chance you won't return it. It is in the picker's best interest from a performance point of view to substitute a missing item with whatever the first recommendation is so a) they are keeping to their time limit and b) won't get told off for subbing with a not-recommended product
Putting all that into context for you and looking at your specific examples above, I am 99% sure they are substitutions suggested by the software and not manual substitutions selected by the picker because from Asda's point of view they are equivalent products.
Availability and substitutions are a big issue for all retailers, not just Asda. I know it is a stinky attitude but if you don't like it you can either do you own shopping and pick your own food or try ordering from somewhere else. The cost pressures on e-commerce are immense and more and more people are switching to online shopping all the time which means retailers are taking the same amount of money and making a fraction of the profit they used to. This means there has to be compromises and/or savings elsewhere and they are always looking at ways to manage this.