Julie's Boggle

The week-plus since we got back from Cornwall has flashed by in a blur of work, evenings out and time-consuming admin tasks like photo-organising and dive-log updating.

I’ve been toying with the idea of using one of the online grocery shopping sites for a while now – mostly because for Tom, grocery shopping in his free time is an anathema. So I headed over to Tesco.com to see how easy all of this would be.

It was a bit of an effort to find all of the items on our list – especially dealing with the categories that they group things into – but I eventually had a list and felt ready to go. However the £5 delivery charge was still enough of a sticking point for me not to actually hit the Checkout button…

In the interest of seeing what else was out there, I wandered over to ASDA’s website. And was pleased to discover a loud red and yellow banner on their shopping home page proclaiming free delivery Monday to Thursday for a spend of over £50. Interesting.

Armed with my Tesco prices, and getting used to the whole searching idea, I quickly whipped through our list again. Almost all of the prices were identical to Tesco’s and there was the advantage of the free delivery… Sounded like a winner.

Once I’d decided to go on that one, I then had to contend with the fact that their silly website isn’t FireFox-friendly, and the buttons in the checkout steps wouldn’t talk. Sigh. Over to IE and carry on. As a final insult I discovered that the code to claim the free delivery was different on the checkout page and the homepage! And the one on the checkout page was wrong! Not something that their customer service guys could tell me, something I figured out for myself when I tried again two days later.

I raced home on Thursday night to make sure that I’d be available for the duration of our 18h00 to 20h00 delivery slot. As it turns out, the guy only arrived at 19h45. Fair enough. There were a couple of surprises – one was that they had “swapped out” an unavailable item despite the fact that I had ticked the box marked “no substitutes”. And what they had swapped was a 2-in-1 shampoo and conditioner for two bottles of conditioner! Odd choice. I could have got a refund processed with the driver, but I’d been thinking of buying some conditioner anyway so I kept them. Not two bottles though so in hindsight that was a mistake.

Anyway, along with the close on a dozen shopping bags, all my groceries had arrived (bar one or two that were out of stock.) So, all in all, a fairly successful online shopping experience that I might even repeat sometime! And with every leading grocery store at my fingertips, I might even try Sainsburys next time!

Oh, the other surprises? Well one was that I’d managed to order the world’s biggest box of Coco Pops (800g!) and the other was that the H&S “shampoo for men” item had metamorphosed into regular H&S shampoo. (Not that it makes any real difference I’m sure! )

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 17th, 2006 at 12:01 pm and is filed under Miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.