arghyle

I really like FreshDirect. It, as you probably know, is a grocery delivery service in NYC. They have a nice web site, a huge selection, and very good food. I find that shopping through them saves me some money and, more importantly, a lot of time.

For the most part the service is incredibly good at getting you want you ordered. Considering that a $100 grocery order could easily have over 30 items from a number of different departments, it’s impressive that FreshDirect is as accurate as they are. In fact in my last 20 (or so) orders I can only recall two problems. Both of these were a single missing item. FD makes it very easy to go to their site and report the problem. On each occasion I got a response in well under and hour and was credited for the item that same day. The customer service, in my experience, is fantastic.

Last week my order was missing a pomegranate. I ordered three and received two. Disappointing, but the site was running a two-for-$5 deal so I would expect that the vast majority of people were ordering two and my request for a third was easy to overlook. Anyway I reported the issue and it was resolved in hours. Or was it?

I got back my purchase price of $2.50, seemingly fair compensation as that is what I paid for the piece of fruit. But upon further reflection, I’m not so sure. Here is a run-down of a reimbursement model that is more comprehensive than FreshDirect’s 1:1 system. It assumes that I needed that item and now have to get one locally.

• Item in question: $2.50
• Difference in price from at a local grocer: $0.50
• Transportation to and from local grocer, including shopping/checkout time: $3.00
• Time spend emailing Fresh Direct, looking through empty boxes again, etc.: $0.25
• Pain and suffering: n/a
• Total: $6.25

So while I very much appreciate FreshDirect’s commitment to customer service and the shipment of accurate orders, I think there are different ways to look at their reimbursement system. What on the surface seems very fair gets complicated upon further inspection. That missing pomegranate doesn’t just leave me without a piece of fruit. And that $2.50 completely fails to take into account the underlying value of FreshDirect’s deliver system and their above-average quality produce. In fact it could be said that FreshDirect is implicitly putting themselves at the same level as any Manhattan grocery–that is to say at the sorry state of a D’Agostino’s or Food Emporium.

But is $6.25 a fair price for them to pay me for a pomegranate? After all, most people wouldn’t consider buying one, even this king of fruit, at anything near that price. It might seem like it harshly penalizes FD for an innocent, infrequent, and inevitable error. That may not be completely untrue, but the fact remains that I have to spend a significant amount of time to right the situation and that $3.00 figure is a very conservative time given how much I value my time after work. Even if I was going to my local grocery for another reason (and why would I after ordering from Fresh Direct?) I would still have to bare the burden of the price discrepancy between Fresh Direct and Whole Foods (another purveyor of POM brand pomegranates). The other sums (time spent emailing and searching through boxes) might seem trifling, but the point is that a missing pomegranate is more than just a piece of fruit.

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