An ill-judged supermarket substitution can derail major life events. This week, Sheree Scanlon ordered a birthday cake candle for her daughter, in the shape of a five. Tesco was out of fives, so sent two twos and a one instead. However, Scanlon didn’t want to top her child’s unicorn cake with a maths lesson.
When supermarket substitutions miss the mark, there is often some fragment of the right item caught up in the wrong one, as when Kim Petchy ordered lemon juice and Asda sent her a lemon cake, or Theo Jordan wanted guacamole but Tesco delivered avocados.
Sometimes, the packer focuses on the wrong word of the original item. Ben Elliot Lee ordered petits pois for a shepherd’s pie and got a 12-pack of Petits Filous. Instead of a bunch of spring flowers, Suzanne Bradish got a bunch of spring onions. (After her tweet went viral, the manager of her local Sainsbury’s dropped by with a bouquet and a refund.)
But some substitutions make no sense at all. Sasha Brendon opened her Sainsbury’s delivery on Christmas eve, only to find the free range Black Norfolk turkey for 12-14 people had been replaced with a chicken big enough to feed only two to three. (Her mum found a frozen turkey in Morrison’s instead and they defrosted it in the bath.)
Helen Bryant got popcorn instead of potatoes from Woolworths in Australia, and Anne Schulthess bought three boxes of macaroni cheese from Tesco and received 13 sachets of Caribbean-style cock-flavour soup mix. Richard Lundy ordered an ab wheel and got a 12-pack of Monster Munch.
Substitutions are a problem for all supermarkets. Two years ago, Which? found that Asda was the worst one for substitutions, with 48% of shoppers receiving alternative items, while Iceland implemented the fewest substitutions (12%).
How do substitutions come about? A packer for Tesco, who wishes to remain anonymous, says: “A scanner tells you what to pick. If you get to an item that is out of stock, you tell the scanner and the scanner suggests an alternative.
“Often this is perfectly reasonable, but other times, the automated system comes up with something really stupid. The person picking has the option to override the system’s suggestion. When they go along with it without thinking is where the problems start.”
Such as the time a colleague obeyed the system and packed printer paper instead of napkins.
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