[zarriak]

Walmart has also fed into this a lot by making it so they are your one stop shop by making it ship stuff that isn’t in stock at your local store. They also by default will give you substitutions if you are doing an online store pickup or delivery order which only has more room for abuse or manipulation of substituting your items for things they need to get rid of etc.

I only use it for a family member but they have intentionally continuously degraded the ui/ux to make it so you fall into these traps and have even basically made it so all of the filters reset every time you search.

[bombcar]

The substitution thing has worked well for me - they now alert you in the app before and you can yes/no the substitution. You can also mark “ride or die” on items and if they can’t get it they don’t substitute.

I don’t recall if they upcharge for more expensive substitution now - before it was free, which was a bit abuseable.

[ok_dad]

> You can also mark “ride or die” on items

Is that what the mark is called, "ride or die"? That would be very un-corpo-like, but I would welcome it.

[bombcar]

It’d be nice but it’s called “allow substitutions” or something. Maybe the database column is r-or-d

[zarriak]

Yeah it worked for a while for me but the person I’m getting the stuff for has all the alerts on their device so I just turn most of the substitutions off. There were a few times where I had generous substitutions but I think they reigned those in.

[jkeddo]

I ordered great value sliced bread last month and they upgraded me to Natures Own brand bread which costs twice as much for free.

[zarriak]

Yeah a few times in the start I would always get egg upgrades from 12 to 18 or even one time 36. It happened for a few other things and I do think if you did it frequently enough you could learn how to game it but nowadays it’s riskier.