What a fiasco!

Well, we've had miserable weather and due to all the ice, and the bitter cold, we decided to try Safeway's home delivery service for groceries. Even though we only live about 15 minutes from the store, neither my roomie nor I wanted to be out in the weather.

It sounded great! You come online, check off the items you want, they shop, give you a date and time frame the order will be delivered to your door, and bring it right out to you for a quite reasonable charge. So we did exactly that and ordered over $150.00 of groceries to be delivered. Easy, right?

Nope, not so easy. We paid extra to have a specific delivery window on Sat. between noon and 2:00 p.m. Two o'clock came and went, but no, I didn't get too upset that they weren't there on time due to the conditions of some yards and driveways in our area. Although the streets are all clear and dry (even side streets in 99% of the area we live in) some driveways are still miserable because we have almost a foot of ice covering the ground, and even though I tried to dig my car out when it was still digable, a 40 mph wind came up overnight, blew snow under one side and totally iced me in.

Three o'clock came and went and by now, I'm getting hungry and they have my dinner on their truck. So, we called the Safeway store and were told they were running about a half hour late, which made no sense as they were already over an hour later than the latest they were supposed to show up. Since there wasn't much I could do about it, after being told that the truck was on it's way and would be there any minute I sat back down and watched TV to wait... and wait... and wait.

It started to get dark and by this time I was wondering if there was even going to be a delivery and my car is stuck in ice, and we really didn't want to take roomie's 4x4 and go to the store because we were supposed to be home for this mystery delivery truck. At 4, I got irritated and had him call again, but this time we were told "the truck should have been there by now." Well, DUH, obviously it should have been but it wasn't.

I decided to make "goodie surprise" with miscellaneous items I had at home because I was hungry, roomie was hungry and we got tired of waiting since it was way past the 2:00 hour. It was a good thing too because that truck didn't get to our house until after 5:00... no excuse except he was just slow.

This to me is not an acceptable way to run a service. I have shopped Safeway stores for over 30 years, and it was my favorite store because they stock many specialty and gourmet items that are not available in other stores. I have their Club Card, and spend about $300 and up on groceries there per month. Now, I'm so irritated with them that I will not only never use their delivery service again, but I will switch grocery stores and shop elsewhere from now on. In my opinion if they were having time problems, they should have called us to let us know... not wait until we called them, not only once but twice to find out what was going on.

I will never use their service again, nor will I shop there, nor will I recommend it to anyone I know. We not only did not receive the groceries when promised, but many items were "substituted" and we got 8 items we did not even order. It sure sounded convenient, but it would have been a smarter move to get dressed, go to the store and do our own shopping because one of the items they substituted was cat food and the cat I have will only eat ONE kind of cat food, so I ended up having to go to the store anyway. No, I did not go to Safeway... I went to Food Lion.