Dear LPG, 

I want to offer a warning for those readers for whom shopping has stopped being a session where you get dressed and take a trip to the local supermarket because it has become a time when you get your computer out and pick your groceries from an online version of the store.

I suppose talking about online grocery shopping makes me sound like a hi-tech pensioner, and although I have learnt quite a bit about online shopping, I still need the help of my daughter, who does most of the work for me.   She clicks the buttons while I decide what I want, so it must be quite comparable to shopping in a store, although instead of following me around the shopping isles and reaching for the items that I can’t reach, she finds them on the screen for me these days. 

The truth is that over the past couple of years, it has become hard for me to get out on my own, and although ordering the things that you need online can take just as long as walking around the shops, the journey to and from is covered and, as it gets more challenging for me to carry even a couple of bags of shopping home, once delivered, I can take my time when it comes to putting them away.

I have been doing this for a while now, and when the delivery man comes, I take it for granted that everything I ordered will be there, but my latest order was disappointing.  

You get them now and then, but when my latest shopping basket arrived at the door, there were so many things I did not want to keep that I was genuinely dissatisfied.   

The problem is that I have become a bit complacent, I suppose.  I did not check the consignment before the delivery man left, which is a mistake that I want to warn all readers who receive online grocery shopping against doing. 
It does not happen very often, but before you let the delivery man leave check that you are happy with what they have sent to you because, in general, once they have left you with your shopping, the only way to change your mind is to get the items back to a branch of the shop yourself which defeats the object of doing the online shop in the first place.

It is one of those points that most of the big supermarkets have policies about, but when you get into the swing of the thing, and it usually works out that you get precisely what you want, it is so easy to tell yourself that the poor delivery man is busy and wants to get off.   But you need to check before you set him free.

DS, Bellingham 

LPG found a few of the larger supermarkets online shopping substitution policies…

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