Everyone wants free cherries!

We often order our groceries online, either via Vons.com or Albertsons.com.  Grocery delivery is particularly useful when we order heavy items, like 40 lb. bags of water softener salt, so we’ll place about one order per month to have a nice man deliver heavy items to our garage.  I placed an order a couple of days ago at Vons.com, and it was delivered this morning.  I go over the delivered items with a fine-toothed comb to make sure nothing is missing, because the one disadvantage of delivery is that there’s often one or two items which are missing or otherwise incorrect.  I found two problems, one with cereal and one with cherries, so I called Vons.com customer service.  I was literally on hold for half an hour waiting to speak to someone, and then waiting to have the problem resolved, and the customer service agent I spoke to was absolutely humourless.

My first problem was with cereal.  I’d ordered a “buy one, get one free” cereal, and received three boxes while being charged for two.  I should have received two and been charged for one.  It turns out that at the very bottom of my order receipt there’s a notation for “corn flake” and a deduction of $3.79, but the cereal I ordered wasn’t corn flakes, and the deduction wasn’t directly under the cereal listing on the receipt, hence my confusion.  The customer service agent told me very sternly, “You didn’t order corn flakes, so when you saw ‘corn flakes’ on the receipt, you should have noticed it was a deduction.  And you were only charged for one box of cereal, so you received one EXTRA box at no charge”.  I know she was visualizing slapping me on the hand with a ruler.

My other, more serious issue, was with cherries.  On the Vons website cherries are listed as “bulk, $1.00/each”, and when you enter a quantity in your shopping cart it equates each increment to .25 of a pound.  So, I put a quantity of “4” in my cart, and a little calculation under the cart said this equaled 1 pound.  My cart showed a charge of $4 for cherries, but when they were delivered, I received 4 lbs. of cherries at $4 per pound, for a total of almost $16!  Now, I like cherries, but not $16 worth when I’m expecting $4 worth.  I brought up this issue with the customer service woman who said that the number of items I ordered was a reference to how many pounds I wanted, not how many quarter pounds.  I explained that the website didn’t reflect that, and reminded her that it listed the cherries at $1/each.  To this she replied, “That’s per cherry.” I asked if she was being facetious, as there was no way one cherry would weigh one-quarter of a pound, but she just said that was how the website was set up.  She then said she’d credit me for everything over and above the $4 I intended to spend, for a refund of $12, and said that this was an on-going problem which the webmasters were trying to correct.  She sounded quite disgusted when she said, “Everyone is calling and wanting free cherries!”

So, add me to the list of common criminals who only want to pay for what they actually order.  If there’s such a thing as karma, I might end up as a cockroach in my next life for my insistence on “free cherries”.

Edited to add:  the cherries don’t even taste very good, so I’m not getting $12 worth of free pleasure out of them rasberry

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 06/06 at 10:59 AM

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  1. Imagine paying $1 per cherry.. that is ridiculous.  Mind you.. I can see where her job would quickly rob her of an humour.

    Posted by Simply Coll  on  06/12  at  05:04 PM

  2. To finish up this story, I had to toss all the cherries in the trash because so many of them were moldy, they contaminated the flavour of the others.  So, not only did I not get $16 worth of cherries for $4, I didn’t get ANY cherries for $4.  Well, maybe I suffered through 4 cherries before I discarded them, so in someone’s mind, I might have gotten my $4 worth wink

    Posted by Leigh-Ann  on  06/12  at  08:59 PM
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