consumer confidence index

Consumer confidence in Walmart is at an all-time low. I’m the consumer. Delivery has been reliable over the past couple years, but in the last month it’s suddenly become sketch.

It started in early February when I got a few bags of groceries I didn’t order. Someone else’s turkey burgers and Lean Cuisine got lumped in with my stuff. In the last week of February, things swung the other way: I was missing about $60 worth of groceries from my order. I had to contact customer service, get a refund, and then re-order all the stuff on a later day. Annoyingly, they’ve removed the “live chat with a customer service representative” function from their site, so you have to call customer support.

Things got worse this Friday, when the grocery order arrived an hour late and two-thirds of the order was missing. That’s around $120 in groceries. Basically, everything refrigerated/frozen was omitted, which was the bulk of the order (and you’d think its absence would be really obvious on Walmart’s end). I had to call customer service again. Gotta keep an eye out to make sure the refund actually comes. I’m slightly nervous if this keeps happening. Up until now, Walmart has been very good about issuing refunds on basically an honor system, but if I keep asking for sizable refunds, they will probably get suspicious even if I genuinely did not get the food.

An aside: A few years ago, Megg said that vegans don’t need refrigerators, since refrigerators are just for meat and animal products. This statement has lived rent-free in my head since then. Must be a lifestyle thing, because if I were vegan, I’d get just as much use out of a fridge/freezer as I do now.

• Soy milk or almond milk for putting in my morning coffee
• Sauces (pasta sauce, bbq sauce, peanut sauce, hoisin sauce, sweet chili sauce…SO many sauces)
• Fresh vegetables. Whatever veggies I’d put in meals in place of meat. I bet I could make pretty good zucchini chops by coating slices in breadcrumbs (is there vegan egg substitute to use in place of an egg wash?), air frying, and topping with pasta sauce.
• Easy heat-and-eat foods: tater tots/fries, veggie pot stickers, impossible corn dogs, etc. Admittedly I don’t know if all these things exist in vegan, or if I’d need to do a lot more cooking.
• Leftovers, both of restaurant food and my own cooking. It’s just convenient to make extras when cooking, especially if I needed to cook more.
• Desserts (pies, sherbet, ice pops, does vegan ice cream exist?)