Terrible Experience With Vons

[BillyGr]

Would depend on how those deals are advertised - if says must buy x quantity, then if you don't get that many you shouldn't expect that sale price. Some stores advertise things at prices like that (say 3 for $5) but really just charge each one for $1.66 (or $1.67), so with that you'd get it no matter how many you buy.

Of course, if they only have part of the order, you are certainly welcome to say you don't want it at the higher price and they can cancel all of it - if that happens often enough, perhaps they'll catch on and stop making the deals that way.

If it is the store's fault that they could not fulfill your desired quantity, you should not be penalized with a higher price. That is not customer friendly. It is not the customer's fault that these grocery store websites do not tie inventory results in with the website very well and keep allowing customers to order items that are out of stock. It is not unusual for Safeway to run promotions in a way where the purchase of 3 units of product (if you buy 3) is less than the cost for the purchase of 2 units of product.

Stores that want to take a hard line on this and up the cost of people's orders due to their failure to be in stock on the minimum quantity required for a sale price are just going to send customers to do their pick ups at places like Wal Mart where there are no games like this on pricing, and far lower regular pricing to begin with.

You don't have to be penalized with a higher price - that is where the part about saying you do not want any of the item at the higher price comes in. If those sales are totally lost due to not having enough items and wanting to charge more for what they do have, they will (hopefully) eventually realize and fix the issue by having more items available.

[storewanderer]

I'm guessing that the stores just don't have a way of fixing this. If a customer buys 2 of something when 3 are needed to get a discount, the system has no way of knowing whether that is because the third was out of stock or the customer simply didn't order it. Programming this might be complicated because there are so many different items that can be combined.

Frankly, I'm not a big fan of offers that require the purchase of multiple items. When the pandemic started, Albertsons waived the requirement to buy 5 products to get the "Fab 5" prices, presumably because so many things were out of stock on the shelves. If they cannot consistently stock things online, they should resume that policy.

Walgreens and Rite Aid can make this work on online orders. You have to add 3 (or 2, or whatever) to your cart to get the discount. But once the order goes to the store, the price is divided by the quantity of items and allocated equally among the items (it is handled this way for returns too). Same story with online orders at Macy's, Kohls, etc. with a buy 1 get 1 50% off offer. It translates down to a 25% off discount on each line item; if the store only fulfills one unit you get the one unit at 25% off; if you return one unit you receive the refund at a 25% off of the full price (and the one you keep, you get the 25% off on).

What I am describing is standard in retail for these promotions when customers order online and it is out of the customer's hands if the retailer fulfills the order or not. This is the industry standard in these cases. Grocers who do not follow this practice with online orders, are going to lose customers online.