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Comment by setquk | Hacker News Reader

As an Ocado smartpass customer who is expecting an order today, this appears to just be manifesting itself as a few items out of stock.

Slightly disappointed though if I’m honest. This was the future. And now it’s going to be looked down on by every semi critical person as a complete failure even though the actual picking process was working very well.

For those who don’t know, Ocado was the only supplier in the UK that pretty much have a 1:1 correlation with what you order and what you get and haven’t been sitting on a shelf for days. All the other supermarkets are picked from local stores by hand and are quite frankly terrible with 2-15 items (from experience) missing on every order and some things very near expiry dates.

Sainsbury’s for example substituted me some bread which was out of stock with a fresh loaf expiring on the day it was delivered. The delivery turned up at 22:00...

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This isn't strictly true. I know in South London that Tesco orders are not "picked from local stores by hand" - they're packed in and dispatched from the same enormous warehouses and depots that supply the stores, and there's some degree of automation involved (although not to the same level of Ocado.)

They only do that where there wasn’t enough room to build the home shopping distribution bays on the existing stores.

They're just trying to replicate the real UK supermarket experience, with the convenience of home delivery.

It's a feature, not a bug.

Its not that night and day.

Ocado will for example substitute some things that I don't really need, and aren't really substitutable. but if they don't have the nappies you ordered? No substitute, nadda. And it isn't like you can wait a week for nappies if you're running out.

Sainsburys I've always found ok, even for our Christmas shop, there weren't any substitutes.

Where Ocado is better is search. If I search for 'juice' in Sainsburys I very quickly get 'quinoa with juice of jojoba'. Ocado gives me actual fruit juices.

In case you don't realize: If they substitute something and you don't want it, you can just ask the delivery person to take that item back. I've not done that often, but when I have they've never had an issue doing it.

(the real big thing for me is that I have a weekly shop set up, and if I forget to look on their site, they'll send me something based on a tolerably ok prediction of what I usually buy; it far from perfect, but good enough that I occasionally doesn't bother log in on purpose, because I know it will be close enough to what I need to be ok)

You can reject things you ordered too, like the £40 of toilet roll added to reserve the delivery...... So I've heard of course.

This does work. I know someone who has done it a couple of times. I suspect that there’s an alarm somewhere that picks out regular abusers though.

I ask for no substitutions on Ocado. I haven’t had any missing items on my receipt for months. They seem to be pushing to do explicit stock allocation and actually remove the products from the store front now if they are out of stock. It’s a better experience if you get to choose up front that wing it on a substitute.

As for substitutes I’ve had some crazy ones from Tesco.

I've been shopping with them for nearly 8 years, haven't had that many issues.

I heard this warehouse only accounted for a small percentage of their capacity but I guess it's a big blow for customers who were primarily served from that location

On the flipside, I rarely have items missing from online orders. That's from a few years with Sainsburies and I've used Tesco for about two years now.

Waitrose do pretty well where I am (and Ocado dont cover my area). Although they dont have an app so you have to use the website.

They do have a reasonably nice app (again) now.

https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/waitrose-partners/id13460641...

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.waitrose.g...

Looking at other articles, this warehouse accounted for 10% of their capacity. It won't affect them that much, hopefully.

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