Sainsbury's: Praise and Vent

TMSG

I've got a Lidl and a Sainsbury's round the corner. I used to shop a lot in the former but since at least a year or so Sainsbury's is consistently cheaper overall, especially when taking into account their various Nectar offers for additional points and lower Smartshop prices. (Of course not everything is cheaper than at Lidl's and I still visit them for some products cheaper or better there, for instance cottage cheese.) Just an example: 220g Stilton (always in great demand in our household) is £2.69 Lidl, £2.50 Sainsbury's and often (eg this week ) I'll get a Smartshop price of £1.88 (and multiple use...!) plus often another 20/40/60 Nectar points. Great! So this is the praise part of the post.
The vent part is this: at any one time about a third of all the wonderful things Sainsbury's want me to buy via their Nectar offers (normally around 20 to 25 products) are out of stock. Some are OOS for a week (though the offers/points are by then gone), others are not available for months on end. I do realise that these offers are put together by some algorithm, probably running in an AWS instance in the cloudiverse... and this thing has not the faintest about the stock situation in the various SB's up and down the country. But it's utterly frustrating to get another really nice set of offers and then to realise that I can't use them, not once, not twice but for weeks and weeks .
I am slowly getting to the point of doing something very un-MSE: ignore the SB offers and go more often to Lidl.
Rant over.

knightstyle

It's not just Sainsburys who do this.  Boots almost never have their 3 for 2 offers on the shelves.  I now order online delivered free to my local store to get the offers.  But as soon as the offer ends there will be plenty of stock on the shelves.

Voyager2002

Actually, I find that Lidl is the worst offender for this.

Chloe_G

Yes, I get the Sainsburys Smart scan offers and make a trip specifically to get these and it drives me mad when they're out of stock as I wouldn't have bothered going.  I have no idea about Lidl as we haven't got one anywhere near us.

IvanOpinion

Three possible reasons:

• There was a headline several weeks back telling people to ensure they had several days worth of food stock in their houses. This led to a bit of panic buying resulting in some shelves being emptied.
• In other instances there have been reports that some supermarkets are having trouble getting the levels of stock they want for some products. Leaflets have to be prepared in advance and then the suppliers can't deliver.
• Some people are just parasites. They see something being discounted and then they guard what they now consider to be 'their supply' and empty the entire shelf into a trolley. It is then off home to inflate the price and get non-foodstuff up on ebay, or trade more perishable stuff around the streets. It is time that supermarkets limited the number of any specific item a person can buy on a single day.

Of course there is the old marketing trick where they use an attention getting offer to get people in the store with no real intention of having that item in stock - but then no supermarket would be that underhanded.

TMSG

To clarify: I am not talking about general stock or lack thereof. I fully realise the many possibilities why stocks can and do run out, either locally or nationally.
 I am specifically talking about those special Nectar offers that can save a tidy amount of money. Last week (and frustratingly again this week) I have SB's Red Label Loose Tea for £1.16 instead of £1.65, a saving of almost 30%. And it's multi-use so I would get two or three packs... that is if any were available. No Red Label Loose Tea since at least two weeks.
It's not at all the first time this is happening; my frustration with SB's has slowly grown over a good number of months. So if they do these promos then why can't they make sure that the stuff is available within a reasonable time frame?

Danien

Sainsbury's is good with pricing and I would buy from them regularly, but being disabled I get home delivery and dealing with everything in a big plastic box rather than bags is really difficult for us. In order to unpack quickly so you can give the box back to the driver, you need a lot of counter space for a weekly shop(which we don't have), or you have to put things away as you go with no rest periods, which is difficult for me. Unpacking the boxes is therefore very slow for us and the driver is often frustrated and my husband gets seriously stessed and anxious by the process. It's a pity as I otherwise I would order the weekly shop from them. I've found their stock control for home delivery not the worst (that would be Asda followed closely by Tesco). Knowing the items are going to available is important if disabled and you can't get back out to replace the missing items. Best stock stock control seems to be Ocado.

cannugec5

Danien said:

Sainsbury's is good with pricing and I he would buy from them regularly, but being disabled I get home delivery and dealing with everything in a big plastic box rather than bags is really difficult for us. In order to unpack quickly so you can give the box back to the driver, you need a lot of counter space for a weekly shop(which we don't have), or you have to put things away as you go with no rest periods, which is difficult for me. Unpacking the boxes is therefore very slow for us and the driver is often frustrated and my husband gets seriously stessed and anxious by the process. It's a pity as I otherwise I would order the weekly shop from them. I've found their stock control for home delivery not the worst (that would be Asda followed closely by Tesco). Knowing the items are going to available is important if disabled and you can't get back out to replace the missing items. Best stock stock control seems to be Ocado.

We don’t have Sainsbury here ,but I do get deliveries from Tesco. 

When I know the delivery is due I get some carrier bags ready in my kitchen. I decant quickly from the delivery crates into my carrier bags and then sort it all and put it away after he has gone. 

That way I don’t need lots of counter top space. 

I have never felt rushed by the driver - sometimes the complete opposite- they stand having a wee chat:) 

Skiddaw1

We have Sainsbury's deliveries and I do the same (decant it all into carrier bags by the front door). It only takes a few minutes.

GrubbyGirl_2

TMSG said:

To clarify: I am not talking about general stock or lack thereof. I fully realise the many possibilities why stocks can and do run out, either locally or nationally.
 I am specifically talking about those special Nectar offers that can save a tidy amount of money. Last week (and frustratingly again this week) I have SB's Red Label Loose Tea for £1.16 instead of £1.65, a saving of almost 30%. And it's multi-use so I would get two or three packs... that is if any were available. No Red Label Loose Tea since at least two weeks.
It's not at all the first time this is happening; my frustration with SB's has slowly grown over a good number of months. So if they do these promos then why can't they make sure that the stuff is available within a reasonable time frame?

Maybe a daft question but is that the very reason why they are out of stock?  If everyone buys 3 times more than they normally would it's not surprising they run out.

TMSG

GrubbyGirl_2 said:

TMSG said:

To clarify: I am not talking about general stock or lack thereof. I fully realise the many possibilities why stocks can and do run out, either locally or nationally.
 I am specifically talking about those special Nectar offers that can save a tidy amount of money. Last week (and frustratingly again this week) I have SB's Red Label Loose Tea for £1.16 instead of £1.65, a saving of almost 30%. And it's multi-use so I would get two or three packs... that is if any were available. No Red Label Loose Tea since at least two weeks.
It's not at all the first time this is happening; my frustration with SB's has slowly grown over a good number of months. So if they do these promos then why can't they make sure that the stuff is available within a reasonable time frame?

Maybe a daft question but is that the very reason why they are out of stock?  If everyone buys 3 times more than they normally would it's not surprising they run out.

Not daft at all: when this happened the first few times I thought the same. However, as SB's regularly do these sorts of promotions I'd expect that they have at least some vague idea about stock levels required to satisfy demand.

And to give me vouchers for three weeks running (and counting...) for a product that's been OOS for at least four weeks seems a bit OTT. Again, if this would be the exception I'd not complain but of, say, 25 articles on my two lists around 6 to 8 are OOS at any one time.  Or, to quote Goldfinger: "Mr Bond, they have a saying in Chicago: 'Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, the third time it's enemy action.'"