Shopping Services

 My worst problem with shopping services has been their tendency to substitute what I've ordered with things that are absolutely worthless to me.  THEN what am I supposed to do???  Often the shopper gives you a chance to refuse, but if you somehow miss warning and don't respond within a minute or so (which is easy to do, since it may only occur within the app, if you have the correct page selected, and your phone may have timed out before it appears) the shopper will often go ahead and make the substitution anyway.

Not in a single case has a substitution been acceptable.  It's often very hard to find the things I want in the first place, even things which are regularly carried somehow are hard to find on Instacart.

For example, Walgreens has a nice self-branded package of 25 "Gauze Pads" which are used for cleaning.  There may be only one thing in the entire store with the exact name "Gauze Pads."  But if you type in "Gauze Pads" into the search window, you will scan through hundreds of items (such as Band-Aids, etc) without coming to Walgreen's "Gauze Pads."

Strangely, if you just type in Gauze, a series of suggestions appears, in which the actual "Gauze Pads" are at the very top.  BUT if you click on that suggestion, you get almost the same useless list as when you type in "Gauze Pads."

If you just type in Gauze the Gauze Pads will appear in about the second page.

I once ordered 3 bars of expensive Shea Moisture soap, the green kind I've had before and loved.  But instead I got 3 bars of Shea Moisture soap in the "Coconut" white variety.  At first I thought "no big deal."  But it turns out the "Coconut" variety has small pieces of coconut in it as an abrasive.  The result is a soap with abrasive qualities like "Lava with Pumice."  This is useless to me, as I have very sensitive skin.  So now I have 3 bars of this soap which cost me over $5 apiece.  I don't feel like donating them either because the poor sap who gets them may well find them as useless as me.