‘Kroger pickup just took me on like the longest roller coaster ride I’ve ever been on.’

While pickup orders via couriers have made life a lot more convenient, they also come with a host of issues of their own. And this is something TikToker Amber (@sensible_amber) learned the hard way after her Kroger pickup order “couldn’t have gotten it more wrong.”

“Kroger pickup just took me on like the longest roller coaster ride I’ve ever been on,” the TikToker explained. “I got there, right at the start of my pickup time. I logged in, waited for about 10 minutes and nothing happened. So then, this like young kid comes out looking almost in tears. And he’s like, ‘We don’t know what’s going on with your order.’ And that’s all the information he gives.”

“So I’m like, ‘OK, what does this mean? Do I need to go home and come back? And he just runs away. So I wait for like, another 20 minutes, and he comes running back out. He’s like, ‘OK, we’ve lost parts of your order. But I’m gonna go personally pick everything all over again.’”

So, once again, Amber was left waiting. This time for 45 minutes. Then, a manager comes out. “And he’s like, ‘I’m so sorry for what happened. That kid is new.’ And I was like, ‘That’s OK. Like, I get it. I had a first day on the job myself.’ And he says, ‘Well, the good news is, we’re gonna give you all of your groceries for free today. And I was like, ‘Oh, hell yes. Because I ordered a whole lot of like meat and everything for my dinners for the week.’”

But sadly, this didn’t go as planned, as Kroger instead gave Ambern “a random assortment of stuff.”

@sensible_amber ♬ original sound – Amber

“It’s like they just handed shopping bags to a few of their employees and were like, ‘Go fill them.’ So the good news is, I got it for free. The bad news is I’m gonna have to make another trip to the grocery store because like we don’t have milk.”

In the COVID age, grocery delivery has boomed. It’s resulted in growing pains as third-party services like Instacart deal with shopping gaffes from their fleets of drivers, many of them men unaccustomed to shopping. Stores like Kroger have implemented new technology along the way. This month, a Kroger shopper went viral after being charged $500 by mistake; similarly, the on-the-ground staff wasn’t able to do much about it.

Amber and a media representative for Kroger didn’t immediately respond to the Daily Dot’s request for comment via email.

*First Published: Dec 26, 2023, 10:00 am CST

Charlotte Colombo

Charlotte is a regular Daily Dot contributor with bylines in Insider, VICE, Glamour, The Independent, and more. She holds a Masters’s degree in Magazine Journalism from City, University of London.