Ok, so when this thread was first posted back in Oct 21, I might have neglected to say that I actually am a Customer Delivery driver for one of the ‘Big Five’. I won’t divulge which one, to save any blushes on my part 
Another well known non shop front home delivery company is not in our delivery zone, so they’re not an option anyway and going back to what was said earlier about the Coop, well to date, I’ve still never seen a Coop home shopping delivery van, well not a recognisable marked up one anyway in a similar guise to other well known supermarkets.
But anyway, I do get our shopping delivered, but not necessarily by the supermarket I work for and of course, I’d never deliver to my own home address. Indeed if I happened to be working on the route on which I live and I saw a delivery to my own house, I’d tell my manager and I’d be shifted to another route. Effectively, it’s down to time slots and when we can fit one in which means if the supermarket I work for doesn’t have a time slot on a particular day that suits us, we shop elsewhere which we frequently do because we have to fit in the shopping with our lives. Not only that, because we do shop from across the ‘Big Five’, they often tempt customers in with coupons offering £10 off a shop on a £50 or £60 spend. It’s amazing what they’ll offer you via email if you haven’t shopped with them for a few weeks.
So, as a driver, it’s an easy enough and quite rewarding job. Sadly, it’s the customers that can make life difficult. 99.9 percent of the time, they are fine, pleasant, polite and are quick to unload their shopping from the delivery crates, but as always in life, you get some absolute *@#!s who completely forget that the driver is just delivering what’s in their basket, we don’t pick their items!
IF ONLY! The amount of substitutions that get returned because folks aren’t happy with what’s been substitued, is often plenty. Unfortunately, quite often, it’s the customer that isn’t actually helping themselves. They do have the option to tick that box by every product that says they’ll either accept a substitute or they won’t. It isn’t difficult, but when you politely inform them they do have the option of ticking that box, it’s like you’ve just slapped them in the face and treated them like they’re a bit thick 
There seems to still be this assumption that ‘The customer is always right’ which of course is often absolute crap Or the usual excuse, ‘I haven’t got the time to be mucking about checking boxes!’. Well of course my thought on that is, if you get stuff you don’t want, you’ve little right to moan about the fact you can’t be bothered to help yourself by taking time over your order. Just don’t take it out on the driver, it’s not their fault.
Unless diesel becomes so expensive that the price of shopping or delivery passes has to rise significantly to cover the delivery costs, home delivery will be with us for the forseeable. There will come a point though, when there will have to be a switch to electric only vehicles, but unless they can provide a vehicle that will last for a multiple stop/start journey of 200 miles a day, because depending on what part of the world you live in and how rural it is, that’s what most of the vans cover, around 200 miles per day over two shifts, then we’ll be stuck with diesel for some time to come. With all electric vehicles as things stand, there just wouldn’t be enough time to charge vehicles between shifts to ensure they had enough juice to last the entire day. The vehicles are running from 0700 to 10pm 7 days a week with just a couple of hours break between shift changeovers. Believe me, they cover a lot of miles!
