NOTE: This is a personal rant, not relevant to my Second Life or Combat: Samurai Island in any way, it just gives me a way to voice my dissatisfaction with a company knowing that Google will index it and make it available to others with the same complaint, as there are apparently quite a few of us, and may perhaps help someone in the future who is trying to decide whether to use Albertsons online by looking for customer reviews on the web.  All my Second Life friends are encouraged to ignore this and move along

A few years ago, I discovered that Albertsons had entered into the home grocery delivery business, and took orders online.  Perfect for a super-busy and super-geeky guy like me who truly hates shopping, right? 

Not just Albertsons, either; Safeway also does home-delivery, and at the time a few others did too, like HomeGrocer.com and a few others that are long since out of business.

So, I’ve been relatively spoiled until now.  Sure, there were a few problems here and there, a few items not delivered or of lower quality than I would choose were I to do my shopping in person, or a substitution made that I would never have approved of, but overall it was just so convenient to order online that I’d always emphatically recommend it to friends and family.

But quite frankly it’s been going downhill a LOT lately.  Safeway kept delivering moldy bread, so I switched to Albertsons exclusively, despite the fact that the Albertsons is excruciating to use - I’m a web dev in RL, so I hate that website all the more knowing that almost any team I’ve worked with in the last decade could do better.

But today just takes the cake (haha, see what I did there?  I’m so funny.  Okay, maybe not).

After waiting 5 hours longer than the delivery window I selected, I phoned the Albertsons customer support number, where I was gruffly told that they’d lost thousands of customer orders today and was just "one of many" with this complaint.

I guess I believe them, since I went to the site to gather information to file a formal complaint, and this is what I was presented with:

What happened is, apparently, that I made my order, received the confirmation email, had my MasterCard charged, and…  Didn’t get my order because it was "Lost".  Customer service tells me that my card "will not be charged", even though I’m looking at the statement right this minute on my other window and I can see that it has been charged. 

Whether my debit card provider is waiting for the charge to be "finalized", or it already has been, is at this point in time not simply not relevant to me.  The money (nearly $700 dollars) is not available to me, meaning that I cannot feed my family until the issue is resolved.  I’m told it can take 7-10 business days to get my money back, so as you might imagine I’m pretty FUCKING PISSED OFF!!!

Yes, I do understand that bad things happen on the technical side that can’t reasonably be anticipated, but that doesn’t justify the extremely poor customer service I received while trying to resolve this issue, nor does it explain the resolution process Albertsons employs (wait until the money is refunded, then resubmit your order via the "Shop my Past Purchases" page).

This is unacceptable, and is the final straw.  Not only will I never shop with Albertsons online, but fortunately for me there are 6 major grocers in the nearby area that are as close or closer than the local Albertsons physical location, so I can safely say that they have lost me as a customer for all time, and it’s not in any way inconvenient to me to express my displeasure with them by going to the competition.

/rant off

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