I've had great experiences so far with food delivery and with grocery curbside pickup. For food delivery, I've either called the restaurant or used the restaurant's website directly to order. This has worked for chain restaurants, but most of my orders have gone to a local establishment which I've just called.

For groceries, I've been buying from a small non-chain establishment: in the morning I send them a Word document with my order on it; they call me to discuss substitutions if necessary and to arrange payment; I pick up my food in the afternoon.

I find it all to be wonderfully pleasant. And my money is going to those who are providing me with food.

It's basically a more streamlined version of picking up orders in a B2B context. There's just no forklifts trucks or flirting with the gatehouse lady (if you're driving a box truck you may as well act the part).

Also, as time has passed it has gotten a lot better now that supply chains have shifted to the change in demand (or demand has shifted back to the supply chains).

This is unusual?

I didn’t realize how much of a quality of life aspect this was for me until the lockdowns. I miss being able to pop over to the shop, see what looks good and make a meal.

My parents get substitutions even when they explicitly don't allow it, but they put up with it out of safety/convenience, and because it's almost impossible to resolve it with these companies after the fact. I just make a weekly trip to the store for them to get the few things they actually wanted, and they write off the rest.

At whose expense though?

So we got much more diversity (yay!) but a lot of them were not up-to-speed, or selling food that wasn't really meant for delivery (and arrived in pieces).

even a 20% failure rate could be tolerable for people who really value the delivery aspect.

I don't understand why you think a half-assed service is acceptable. I don't believe I'm being unreasonable. 20% failure rate is unreasonable.

If I didn’t get my food 20% of the time, that would be a problem.

But if a dish is missing, the food isn’t piping hot, it’s less than an hour late or the packaging is a disaster twenty percent of the time, that’s fine. I still saved time.

We shop for a week but often find there are multiple items that have short dates i.e. less than a week, their soft fruits don't seem to last, and need to remember to remove all the other fruit and veg from it's packaging otherwise it gets covered in condensation when it comes out of the cold van.

Also way too much non-recyclable packaging.

Other than that their pretty good, cheaper than Sainsburys, and the advantage of shopping one line is you can see what the final bill is as you go

One example: An order I needed to make dinner for some friends that were coming over just didn't turn up one day. I called close to ten times, each time a different excuse including: "I can see it's just around the corner", "I promise it will be there within 15 minutes", "we can't get hold of the driver", "there was a problem at the warehouse", "the driver was in an accident", etc. At about 11:30pm they finally admitted the driver was just behind schedule, the order wasn't coming and it would be delivered the next day. When it came the next day (~4 hours late) it contained no fresh or frozen items as "Ocado don't re-deliver fresh or frozen items". I guess they don't think it's important to inform customers of that fact. So I ended up with a load of cleaning products and some tinned tomatoes.

This was just one of a long list of terrible experiences. I honestly think it's company policy to encourage their staff to lie to customers. Hands down consistently the worst customer service I've ever experienced from any company.

If they're the best we have I think that industry has some space for improvement.