I’m hoping someone has a definitive answer for what causes the phenomenon, but educated guesses are cool too.
Lately I’ve been trying more generic products to try saving some money, and despite my dislike for the company, Walmart generally has the cheapest prices around me for groceries. But trying to read product reviews to get an idea of what to expect it seems like the vast majority of comments don’t talk about the product’s qualities at all but just Walmart related service problems.
“This item was missing from my order!”
“It’s expired, I want a refund!”
“The can was dented.”
“Delivery driver put the chips under the milk!”
etc.
My question is: are these just confused users that are intentionally leaving these pointless messages on specific products they order instead of contacting support, or (my current suspicion) that Walmart is somehow presenting them with some kind of post-purchase rating request that is easily confused as something intended for customer service?
And regardless of the cause of it, why doesn’t Walmart do anything to filter them out? They don’t help prospective shoppers decide on an item, and usually only serve to make the employees/company look bad.
I don’t place orders on their site so I don’t know what the typical web order flow looks like to the end user so I’m hoping someone has an idea what’s causing it.
There’s multiple Targets much closer to me than the nearest Walmart but I can’t recall a single time I’ve gone to one and they’ve had all the items in stock I was looking for. Simple staple items that shouldn’t have scarcity problems that just aren’t being adequately ordered or stocked on shelves.
Now that I’ve finally vented about this problem I’m now also imagining the monkey paw curling and all the customer service complaint comments will just be replaced with LLM generated pro-WM propaganda :(
…what? What are you shopping for thats not in stock?
It’s not like specific items always being unavailable, it’s just different random things being OOS necessitating a second grocery stop. It happens everywhere, but at least post Covid, and in my region, it happens consistently with Target.
e.g.:
Tombstone pizza is a pretty good replacement for Jack’s if they carry it.
Tombstone is more expensive than Jack’s but it’s definitely a huge step up in quality. When I’m just focused on maximizing my budget Jack’s is the lowest I’ll tolerate. But if the goal is taste and quantity of toppings, Tombstone is certainly the better option.
Good to know about Jack’s place on the frozen pizza ranking. I actually like the sauce on Tombstone pizzas which is rare for me. Pepperoni tastes pretty damn too.