Supermarket Substitutions

We use Asda and you can check a box to have no substitutions so we do that, but before we realised this most substitutions were fine - usually same product different brand

At least her mother can keep amused.

Before the lockdown I placed an online order with Iceland, a few products were damaged and had the air get into them. They substituted summer fruits squash with orange squash, apparently that’s fairly normal to do but I was fuming as it’s just a waste of money when no one likes orange, I felt like emailing them saying if I had wanted orange squash then I would have chose it myself! No point though x

Tesco used to do great substitutions where they would give you higher price items for the same price. Got some brilliant bargains with those substitutions but most supermarkets seem to use it as an opportunity to replace a low cost item with a high price item and charge you the full price. A recent Morrisons order pretty much removed all the special offers from the shop and substituted items that prevented multi-buy offers from working, completely unprofessional in my view but I guess they use the Covid 19 situation to justify it. Consequently will not be using them again for online orders as the last order was extremely disappointing. Contrast that to Sainsburys who I admit I am not the biggest fan of normally, not keen their prices and hate the nectar reward scheme, who delivered their online orders in a very professional manner so they have gone up in my estimation. Tesco is really the only supermarket I have substitutions enabled but its hard to get a Tesco delivery slot and they rarely substitute items as their stock control system seems better organised.

Whenever I’ve shopped at Iceland, they’ve never given me any substitutions. They just mark the items as unavailable, even when there are some obvious substitutions they could make. This is probably just my local store, as I know they give substitutions to other people in other areas.

All of the substitutions I’ve been given by the supermarket pickers and packers have been great. Iceland have been amazing during this pandemic and they have been giving me substitutions weekly.

I tick no substitute on most but the ones they have substitute while not what I would have picked have been reasonable.

Shame really Durex Play Little Devil Vibrating Ring would have brightened up lock down

I’ve had a few good and bad the funniest one was a substitute for a bottle of wine that was out of stock so they replaced it with Bombay gin. I hate gin so gave it to my twin sister.

I took a risk with the substitutes with a bbq charcoal order - they had four different sorts so I ordered one bag thinking I was safe - they sent three packs of firelighters as every sort of fuel was out of stock. Great sub if I was an arsonist but useless for the planned barbie. Tesco do the best subs options.

I remember a couple of years ago, at Christmas, asda had run out of turkeys so started sending people packs of bacon instead... like dont worry, you don’t need a roast turkey on Christmas Day, bacon sandwiches will do