The Amazon Fresh store in Morton Grove sent out big postcards to the locals offering Prime Members to save $20 when you spend $40 at Amazon Fresh store July 12 and 13, Prime Day. With our inflation problem, who could resist!
Especially when they include tempting specials like BOGOs on ground beef, bacon and shrimp. And great loss leaders like avocados two for $1, strawberries $1 a pack, all Campbell’s soup $1 a can or Hillshire Farm Kielbasa $1 each. The postcard was followed by a newspaper-sized double page flyer with more than 60 items offered.
So we went early the second day. Most of the advertised specials were completely sold out. Big stretches of empty bins and racks where avocados, strawberries etc. should have been. There was a vicious grabfest at the shrimp freezer but I was able to grab one bag of the correct shrimp. But not the second bag. There were no substitutions, we were told, so the smaller sized shrimp packs that were the same weight were not an option. I tossed the one bag back into the freezer. This would prove important later!
On and on it went. We had a list of items to total $40 but they were completely out of most of what we have tagged. Still the spend-$40-get-$20-off was out there so we subbed where we could or had to and our running total came to around $44.
When we went to “just walk out” we were surprised that the “traditional” check-out lines where you put your items on the belt and the cashier rings you up were mobbed. Why don’t they just walk out? we asked ourselves. Something about the mob scene made me think and I stopped and took a few snapshots of what was in our cart.
Then we "just walked out" and waited for the receipt to show up in the cellphone. By 11 p.m., it still had not materialized. But when we got up the next morning, there it was, posted at 6 am. $70 something. No $43. No $20 off. (We speculated that, since the offer was for the previous two days only, the fact that the receipt was posted at 6 am the following day meant that we were not entitled to the $20 off of $40 purchase).
And every item we had touched but put back because it was not the one on the flyer was listed as something we bought WOW!
Husband tried calling Amazon but the phone answerers could not help us, they said. We had to go back to the store and deal personally. Not the way I expected to spend my day! I was picturing the mob scene at the regular-old-checkout system from the previous day.
Instead, the place was quite empty. We were referred to the Customer Service desk tucked in the far corner where a very nice and extremely apologetic man commiserated with us as we told our tale. It turns out he was only able to mark certain items as ‘returns’ – that was how the receipt “got corrected”. He picked out about seven of the items, we all agreed that the total brough the purchase down to a little over $20, and we were done.
What a horrible mess!
You now, there are people on this chatlist that hate Mariano’s, won’t shop at Jerry’s, avoid Jewel. Put us down for never setting foot in an Amazon Prime store again! Hope you have a better experience!