Supermarket abuse of pricing?

Asda have some awful subsititutes when the product customer orders is out of stock. I don't know if its the staff or the handset they use to suggest the alternatives.

When my friend's brother was recovering from surgery, unable to drive. He did an online order. One of the items he requested was a pack of single Twix. His alternative was picked as, tampons! They are both long and thin, individually wrapped and begin with T. Then the similarities end.

A family friend does a lot of baking. As doesn't drive, she orders online from various supermarkets. Usually sometimes she gets £x off £y vouchers. On her Asda order, she ordered 3 packs of lemons as making lemon curd. She got instead, three bottles of lemon washing up liquid! I'm sure she didn't make lemon curd from these.
 
Last edited:
NickK said:
Supermarkets seem to have two prices - one with a card and one without. It seems the with card is the normal price but the prices without seem to be inflated or following inflation.

It seems to me that this is abuse of pricing to force membership of their reward system and force customers to hand over their data or suffer financial disadvantage.

GDPR bans preventing offering a service to force handing over customer data.

Thoughts?
Click to expand...

I have had the exact same thoughts, not sure where the line is though.

I cannot stand ‘club card’ price - I’ve refused to shop in Tesco ever since I noticed it. But others have followed.
 
Last edited:
cheesefest said:
Asda have some awful subsititutes when the product customer orders is out of stock. I don't know if its the staff or the handset they use to suggest the alternatives.
Click to expand...
Half a dozen of one, six of the other.
(Not Asda, but ours are exactly the same)

The handset makes a 'suggestion' which is usually based upon a text search of the item name, sorted by distance from the expected place of the item on shelf.
However, the staff member is under pressure to pick as fast as possible, and can override & basically grab whatever is nearest.

Either one can produce spectacularly stupid substitutes.
That's not even starting in wrongly labelled trays and items in the wrong tray :-p
 
leezer3 said:
Half a dozen of one, six of the other.
(Not Asda, but ours are exactly the same)

The handset makes a 'suggestion' which is usually based upon a text search of the item name, sorted by distance from the expected place of the item on shelf.
However, the staff member is under pressure to pick as fast as possible, and can override & basically grab whatever is nearest.

Either one can produce spectacularly stupid substitutes.
That's not even starting in wrongly labelled trays and items in the wrong tray :p
Click to expand...
In the large supermarket where the online orders are picked, there’s about 8 aisles between lemons and washing up liquid!
 
Being an online picker is a really tough job. You have to hold the scanner in one hand and do all the picking up with the other one; there is not enough time allowed to be picking up and putting down the handeset. RSI and elbow problems are endemic; managers refuse to accept that the medical problems are caused by the work so staff leave as they can no longer do the job. Early shifts are from 3-4am through to 7-8am. That often means the items are out of stock. AI substitutions are pretty good but often that means being slower than is demanded so any old item is grabbed as a sub. This is the result of unreasonable expectations of pick rates. Try shopping at a rate of around one item per 20 seconds for four hours.
 
MikeTimbers said:
Being an online picker is a really tough job. You have to hold the scanner in one hand and do all the picking up with the other one; there is not enough time allowed to be picking up and putting down the handeset. RSI and elbow problems are endemic; managers refuse to accept that the medical problems are caused by the work so staff leave as they can no longer do the job. Early shifts are from 3-4am through to 7-8am. That often means the items are out of stock. AI substitutions are pretty good but often that means being slower than is demanded so any old item is grabbed as a sub. This is the result of unreasonable expectations of pick rates. Try shopping at a rate of around one item per 20 seconds for four hours.
Click to expand...
are you having a laugh?
being a car mechanic is a tough job, or plumper, cleaner etc...

picking up light weight food items with one hand and scanning with another...... childs play
next you will be claiming pushing a trolley is hardwork.


you are aware their or actual body breaking manual labour jobs out there right? order picking is about as cushy as you get with 0 skills
 
Last edited:
arknor said:
are you having a laugh?
being a car mechanic is a tough job, or plumper, cleaner etc...

picking up light weight food items with one hand and scanning with another...... childs play
next you will be claiming pushing a trolley is hardwork.


you are aware their or actual body breaking manual labour jobs out there right? order picking is about as cushy as you get with 0 skills
Click to expand...
almost all pickers are women.
most online orders are not for individual items but multi-packs. try it when it's a 12-pack of 2l water or cat litter or a four-pack of tinned food, etc. If you haven't done it, try it.

let's not descend to whataboutism. mechanics don't lift engines and aren't on a clock in the same way. cleaners too. they don't have an electronic device reporting on their performance by the second. fail to meet the KPI and get a warning. fail twice and get fired.

my wife has been a picker and a cleaner. cleaning was much much easier.
 
MikeTimbers said:
Being an online picker is a really tough job. You have to hold the scanner in one hand and do all the picking up with the other one; there is not enough time allowed to be picking up and putting down the handeset. RSI and elbow problems are endemic; managers refuse to accept that the medical problems are caused by the work so staff leave as they can no longer do the job. Early shifts are from 3-4am through to 7-8am. That often means the items are out of stock. AI substitutions are pretty good but often that means being slower than is demanded so any old item is grabbed as a sub. This is the result of unreasonable expectations of pick rates. Try shopping at a rate of around one item per 20 seconds for four hours.
Click to expand...

Often wondered if pickers are on a rate.

At least they get a route to follow to pick- unlike our local sainburys that really ***** me off with the constant relocating of stock. They do it on purpose.. but it makes my shop 5 times longer and that **** me off more and I can say I'm not going to buy crap that is not on my list due to people relocating things.. I don't have the time to browse.. why? because I'm trying to find the damn ******* item on my list that they have relocated.

I'm going to get a t-shirt made that basically says "Sainsbury's - stop moving **** around, it slows me down so I can't browse for things not on my list!".
 
cheesefest said:
Those who moan about self scans. Staff, not just my store, elsewhere leave without being replaced fully - in terms of hours. Plus got 3 long term sickness (hip replacement, back surgery and something else which i can’t remember). That’s just the customer service. There’s another 3 with surgery which was postponed by Covid.

It’s a legal requirement for staff to have breaks, days off and annual leave. There’s no law to say a till must be opened! A Sunday last summer - we had just SIX, yes SIX staff in the entire asstore! When we normally have 12-15. We still had to have breaks. It was a combination of annual leave, sickness and jury service. Employers can’t defer any employee’s call up. The jury service colleague still had to have her days off.

Customers who shout at us for no staff have never worked in retail. They wouldn’t cope! We had some new starters and all left within 6 weeks as they couldn’t hack the rudeness from customers. YOU are responsible for staff to leave. If you were pleasant, they would have stayed. Store manager has requested more staff but head office blocked it. As probably worried about the same thing happening again.

There’s no need for being rude, abusive
Click to expand...
How big is your store?

We found out quickly that if everyone is not trained on checkouts and able to support surges then there’s no point having self scans available as they still demand a number of workers when they’re busy.

Checkouts were always understaffed but other departments were sacrificed to step in during busy times.
 
Please don’t post loyalty card numbers to share. Tesco (for example) give generic money off vouchers depending on how much you spend so if you use someone else’s card, you’re effectively earning them money.

If you post your own loyalty card to share, you’re breaking the rules about profiting from the forum.

Thanks.
 
Stumble Bum said:
It ****** me off more they don't also put the price per unit on the 'reduced' price making it impossible to determine which product is better value for money.
Click to expand...
Most people have a phone in their pocket or bag that has a calculator app. What's the issue with punching in 499 / 12 or 350 / 8?
Reuben klang said:
Yeh it’s ridiculous if you are getting the fancy stuff but fruit boxes (usually 6 apples, pears, oranges, 4 bananas, punnets of strawberries) are £15-20 meat boxes depending on what you get £40.
Click to expand...
In my local Aldi, a bag of 6 apples, a bag of 6 pears, a bag of 6 oranges, a bunch of bananas, and 3 punnets of berries might cost £10 total. £15 - £20 for the same thing sounds like a rip off.
Jono8 said:
I wish we could go back to a time before loyalty cards, coupons codes, cashback, reward points etc etc.

Just have the same price for everyone.
Click to expand...
You can; it's called ALDI. No loyalty cards, no coupons, no fuss, and the same price for everyone. We buy about 85% of our food from our local ALDI store, and we love it. The other 15% comes from Costco (certain organic bulk items) and Walmart (specialty items that Costco and ALDI don't sell).


Raymond Lin said:
Actually, that part I don't have a problem with. I just will not be buying those items, period.

The problem is that they don't tell you the cost per weight size percentage when it is on a club card price.

So you can't compare the same item in a different size whether it is better value with a club card discount at a glance, not without doing some mental arithmetic. By law they need to show that, and they do....but not on the club card price.

That's the bigger issue for me.
Click to expand...
Or just pull out your phone and use the calculator app?
Hotwired said:
Give it 5 minutes before they netflix the sharing of loyalty cards.
Click to expand...
Costco has started cracking down on people sharing membership cards by insisting to look at your card (to check that it's yours) before you checkout.
Classic Blue Theme said:
That and when the manufacturers change the model numbers to prevent price matching.
Click to expand...
Indeed.

"This product is not eligible for price match as the model number is 11458B, and we only sell model number 11458."

Costco very often has unique model numbers for the electronics that it sells.
martin363 said:
Not everyone wants to be a member of some supermarket club.
Click to expand...
ALDI has no loyalty program. :)
 
Last edited:
MikeTimbers said:
Being an online picker is a really tough job. You have to hold the scanner in one hand and do all the picking up with the other one; there is not enough time allowed to be picking up and putting down the handeset. RSI and elbow problems are endemic; managers refuse to accept that the medical problems are caused by the work so staff leave as they can no longer do the job. Early shifts are from 3-4am through to 7-8am. That often means the items are out of stock. AI substitutions are pretty good but often that means being slower than is demanded so any old item is grabbed as a sub. This is the result of unreasonable expectations of pick rates. Try shopping at a rate of around one item per 20 seconds for four hours.
Click to expand...
They get online pickers to do the picking before most of the delivery is done.

My colleague’s daughter is an online picker and she’s sweating. Think the handset puts the order through with the least amount of walking, not how the customer ordered it. So stops them going down the cleaning aisle for bleach, down the home baking aisle for flour. Then back to the cleaning aisle for j cloths etc
 
Aldi’s fruit and veg quality is shocking, I rather pay 30-50p more for the same thing at another supermarket then to bin half - three quarters of Aldi’s produce.

Actually it’s cheaper to buy expensive stuff and use all of it than cheaper and binning most of it
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom