the final part of the @sainsburys saga - now moving to @waitroseuk

So, Sainsburys finally send me ??20 in vouchers to apologise for the order when it arrived not using my voucher and having a more expensive delivery slot. Still haven't told us why the delivery didn't turn up in the first place, but we were feeling fairly pleased with this outcome.

We tried to spend the vouchers?? on this weeks shop. The online shopping experience doesn't offer fresh meat or fish from the counters, only pre packed stuff. We wanted a roasting joint, and they had a very limited selection, less than the small Sainsburys up the road from us.

In light of all this, we put the same order through the Waitrose online shopping. It was ??4 more expensive on food price alone, but the delivery price clinched it. On Waitrose, completely free if your order is over ??50. On Sainsburys, if your order is over ??40, between ??3.50 to ??5.50 a pop. You do the maths on that one. This week's groceries are coming from Waitrose.

What do you do with the vouchers then? Well. Spend it on wine to drown the sorrows of the terrible experience of course. We put 6 bottles in our Sainsburys basket for our one last final shop with them. Our order came to less than ??40. So the delivery slot we picked went up to ??6 from ??3.50, only being announced as we went to check out. We're probably still going to buy the booze to drown our sorrows, it's just alot more expensive than we thought it would be.

On a user experience note, we liked the feature on Waitrose's website that allowed us to leave little notes on each item for the personal shopper who would be picking our order, such as "green bananas please" or "two fairly similar sized fish please". When we found that, I felt like leaving them a note saying "At last, someone who wants to know what their customer wants from their shopping". They even had a box by the delivery address box where you could leave notes too, so I made sure I had explained where our house was in detail. If the Sainsbury's website had had this address notes box in the first place, they probably wouldn't have lost us as customers.

Let's hope Waitrose delivers...