Tag: grocery_gateway

When astroturfing a blog, don’t do it from the office …

Ah, the Grocery Gateway/Longo’s buyout debacle. I thought it was but a distant memory until I received this comment to the blog. Here it is, in its raw, uncommented, unedited form:

Author : Bob C (IP: 206.186.239.130 , mail.longos.com)
E-mail : mephistopholes_826@hotmail.com
URL :
Whois : http://ws.arin.net/cgi-bin/whois.pl?queryinput=206.186.239.130
Comment:
I have been ordering from Grocery Gateway throughout the entire mess, and they have really improved. Finally I can get all that I need, on time, and in reasonably good condition. What they need is to carry all the products on Longos stores (Longos is excellent) and debit.

Look at the posting address: 206.186.239.130, aka mail.longos.com. Yeah, that’d be a Longo’s employee trying to be teh smrt d00d and pretending to be a loyal, and above all not-in-any-way-related-to-Longo’s, customer.

Jings, what do corporate lackeys have for brains these days?

Grocery gateway: now with added uselessness

I used to be mad about Grocery Gateway. Now I’m mad at them.

Our last (and by last I mean final, never again, not just most recent) order was a disaster:

  • the delivery was made 15 minutes before our delivery window, at 5:45am.
  • the driver did not call beforehand.
  • the driver was discourteous to Catherine.
  • only 2/3 of the items we ordered were delivered.
  • some of the items appeared to be dirty and badly handled.
  • they’ve put an extra inexplicable charge of $75 on my credit card.

I e-mailed a complaint on the morning of the delivery, and an automated reply promised me a response within 24 hours. A week later, an anodyne semi-human response trickled in, hardly worth the bits it was printed on.

The whole Grocery Gateway/Longo’s debacle has caused quite a stooshie on GTABloggers, with voxpopgirl more than sharing my outrage. A self-described PR-flack for Longo’s tried to make amends by saying how much in debt GG was, how Longo’s pride themselves on exemplary customer service, how hard a job it was, blah blah, rhubarb rhubarb. No ice was cut.

Longo’s cancelled the order of a person with disabilities. Is it possible to get worse PR than that?

Good riddance,Longo’s Grocery Gateway. I won’t shop with you any more, and I’d strongly recommend other to take their money elsewhere.

Goodbye, Grocery Gateway

It seems that yesterday was probably our last Grocery Gateway delivery. The somewhat dejected driver said that service as we know it ends on Friday. If anything of the company remains, it won’t deliver the same range of stock, and it very probably won’t deliver in Scarborough.

Apart from their recent payment debacle (where they claimed that MasterCard had stopped a payment fully two months after the transaction — and afterwards, Grocery Gateway’s payments department was spectacularly rude to me, and gave me derisory compensation for the half day I wasted sorting out their error), we’ve found them to be useful. Most of our 40+ deliveries have been as we ordered, and on time. We’ll have to find an alternative now.

I’m disappointed that they weren’t more of a success. They didn’t seem to advertise very well, and never played their environmental card one bit. I don’t know how many car journeys a full grocery delivery van could cut out, but it’s a sane, rational way of dealing with our pollution problem.

Waitaminute — sane, rational, anti-pollution, North America? What was I thinking?