Walmart Grocery Pickup, Walmart App, and Walmart+ is getting more frustrating.

Walmart Grocery Pickup is getting more frustrating.

Walmart has been looking at ways it can convince more people to pay for Walmart+, which is their answer to Amazon Prime.

Recently, Walmart decided to ditch DoorDash because the “partnership” wasn’t working out, and by “wasn’t working out”, I mean that DoorDash doesn’t actually pay their slaves enough to bother, so orders would just sit forever until Walmart canceled them without delivery.

On the off chance that your order went through, Walmart basically discouraged tipping the driver, which created even more bad feelings towards the scheme from drivers, which caused even more drivers to stop taking Walmart orders. Some had stories like “I just carried in like 100 gallons of bottled water up four flights of stairs for $3 and the cheap fucker didn’t even tip me!”.

So that didn’t last long, and now our local Walmart has its own delivery van and a store employee. (You can tip them, but Walmart has to pay them the legal minimum wage, and it’s Walmart’s van and gas money. This is a win for labor.)

I usually pick up grocery orders. I don’t go inside much because I have a Walmart credit card which gives me 2.5 times as many points to have someone else do my shopping.

When Walmart Grocery Pickup was new, they were very eager to please and almost never just said “We’re out of that particular brand and size so here’s a bigger item or the national brand at no additional charge.”.

Lately, they just say they’re out, and then you have to go park the car again and run in for one thing.

On top of that, recently they shoved my grocery order into someone else’s car and then the app told me I had already picked it up. Nobody fessed up as to who pulled the order because they didn’t want to get written up for doing that.

Several times, they shove part of someone else’s order into my car and I may not realize this until I’m home with the stuff.

But they also like to hand me produce that has obviously gone bad, damaged cans, damaged meat that’s bleeding all over the bag, etc.

In these cases, you tell the Web site you want a refund and usually it just says refunded and no need to return it.

Walmart also has a “Scan and Go” app for Walmart+.

Wegman’s just got rid of this in their stores because they said it caused grocery theft to increase by 18%.

At least I saw another article saying 18%. The New York Times doesn’t offer a figure. But 18% sounds like what would happen. This article cites a university study that says up to 10% of what walks out the door with Scan and Go apps might be stolen merchandise, and that Walmart gave up on it for a while but brought it back.

So we get to pay even higher grocery prices during hyperinflation while Walmart tries to figure out what their business model actually is.

They recently started spamming me about some streaming app that they bundle now.

Streaming is just like Bittorrent (or checking out DVDs from the library for free) apparently, only with commercials, monthly fees, “HDMI errors”, and having to download something every time you watch it.

I find the concept of having 10-12 streaming apps quite amusing. Like, that anyone would do that in THIS economy.

Uber Eats driver says he made 37 cents in 4 hours due to having to fill up his gas tank. (Less than nothing after car wear and tear and the IRS and state.)

An Uber Eats driver says he made 37 cents in 4 hours due to having to fill up his gas tank. Less than nothing after car wear and tear and the IRS and state.

I constantly have to explain to my spouse why it wouldn’t be worth it for me to do UberEats or something for more money.

Many people don’t understand until they’re doing it.

If this man “earned” 37 cents in 4 hours, he probably had to put miles on his car to do it.

The more you drive, the more wear and tear your car accumulates, and the faster you’re in the repair shop. It also drags down the value of your car several cents per mile.

When the thieving IRS and thieving state revenue department go after him to steal “their share” of the money at the end of the year, so that they can pay themselves with it and buy votes from people who don’t do much of anything at all, they’re going to want about ten bucks out of that day’s earnings.

(Social Security and Medicare will demand to be paid twice, because he’s “self-employed”.)

So it would be more correct to say that this man just spent $17 in depreciation and taxes more than he earned, so that he could waste 4 hours out of his day delivering food for an app company in San Francisco, who alongside the thieving IRS and the thieving state and local governments, and the oil companies, are the only ones who made any profit.

Had he stayed in bed and slept for 4 more hours, at least he’d be flat even and would have gotten a good night’s rest.

But I’m sure there’s a rather unpleasant little person somewhere complaining that his food was cold.

The worst part of all of this is the government, of course. It provides him with no employment protections, no minimum wages, and expensive gasoline, and then takes more than he earned.

He earned 37 cents. Some of that gas is taxes.

Let’s say that they took $20 from him and didn’t do a damned thing for him. Then people are all like “I don’t know why you dislike the government so much, bro!”

Imagine working for several hours, then some thug walks up, punches you in the face, and runs off with your wallet. Taxes.

DoorDash takes four days to respond to police after driver crashes into garage and flees the scene.

DoorDash took four days to respond to police in Grayslake, Illinois after their driver left her car in drive and it took off and crashed into garage and she fled the scene.

She did run back up the steps to leave the McDonalds before fleeing.

I guess that’s what they meant by Big Mac Attack.

The kicker is that DoorDash apparently has insurance that would have paid out, and still has to, and she still got “fired” (“removed from the platform”), but now police are looking for her for fleeing the scene of an accident involving property damage, which is a Class A Misdemeanor.

CNN stops bothering to hide that the economy has turned sour.

CNN was one of the last few holdouts insisting that we were in a “strong economy” with “robust growth” and “record job creation levels” and that high inflation would be “transitory” in America.

Sometime around yesterday, they changed their minds and finally started reporting what investment magazines and CEOs were saying for months, that a dire recession is coming. (It’s already here, though.)

I’ve said over the last few years, repeatedly, that we were in a “second tech bubble”, with the first big one of course being the Dotcom Bubble of the late 1990s and early 2000s where investors were willing to throw at and lose money on anything vaguely tech related that sounded like it might have a business plan, no matter how insane.

But even I didn’t see what’s happening now coming. We’re in uncharted territory on gasoline prices (for the United States….Europe has always had very decadent and corrupt politicians who subscribed to this green new deal insanity, but it’s a pretty new concept here).

There’s a shortage of baby formula, and the president of the United States refuses to do what current law authorizes him to, in order to get it under control. Because he doesn’t want to go too hard on the oligopoly that produces it all.

There’s pretty much every major company laying off or going into a hiring freeze at about the same time.

Carvana is about ready to collapse and has lost their license to sell any cars at all in the entire state of Illinois.

And streaming companies like Netflix are seeing record cancellations and the end to subscriber growth, and admit it will accelerate.

Walmart has had its worst trading days since the 1980s this week, losing 19% of its share price in three days. Target and Amazon got hammered much worse.

The whole thing is an epic disaster. And where is the news? Trying to tell people that “this millennial in their 20s just bought a $700,000 house….so why don’t you have one?”. (CNBC bullshit)

I’m just so sick and tired and goddamned disgusted by it all. I’ve tuned out advertising completely. I don’t have any streaming disservices in my house. I watch movies and stuff on discs. Usually ones I borrowed at the library, which I have to pay taxes for whether I use it or not.

I’ve blocked advertisements from appearing in my Web browser since 1998, when I got on the Web and found out there were ads and that they were slowing my browsing down a lot (images on a 56k modem….and now videos on my cable that I didn’t consent to watching).

I couldn’t really care less about their damned “economy” aside from how it bleeds into our household and affects our lives.

So far, we’ve weathered this better than a lot of people I know, who foolishly take on lots of debt over things that aren’t even remotely important and then plead bankruptcy for the fourth time.

That’s where advertising leads people. They go “There’s a scratch on my car…Get rid of it!”, “I bought those jeans last year….I need new jeans!”, “I’m so sick of this TV. It only has the features from 2020, I need the 2022 model!”.

And so a lot of what people spend money on isn’t only unnecessary, it’s ridiculous, it’s corrosive to their actual wellbeing.

They can’t afford healthcare, they can’t afford rent, they can’t afford groceries or transportation, because they’re sitting around a mountain of crap that doesn’t do any useful work for them, that they bought because the advertisers told them they were entitled to it.

The Democrat Party and the Republican Party that let laissez-faire Crapitalism dictate trade policy, who bankrupted us as a nation, who convinced us all we could “just go shopping” to cure what ails you, have no answers for how to fix anything, because they’re the ones who don’t really want to fix it.

Even Trump said he opposed NAFTA, then he got in and made it even worse.

But tech is the most interesting point of the economic collapse in my opinion.

Where are all of the people who were saying Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon had these trillions of dollars in “value”? Fake value which is starting to be erased. They’re silent. They’re going away.

And it turns out that the biggest fools of them all were the ones telling people to invest their money in the companies like Tesla and Netflix, which deserve to fail.

They deserve to fail for many reasons, including defrauding their investors and their customers, but they also deserve to fail because their customers have no control over their products.

Even now, you buy TVs with a “Netflix” button that paid to be there. After the company goes bankrupt, it’ll just be something you accidentally hit that doesn’t do anything anymore.

Like how Webvan left all of those empty tubs and that turns out to be their assets after the bankruptcy.

Speaking of Webvan….Instacart, Doordash, Grubhub.

I believe that economists will eventually call this the “app” or “smartphone” bubble, because it seems like everything involving those is shit hitting the fan, but there are lots of other bubbles too, like “cryptocurrencies”.

I remember when there were going to be “internet currencies” called flooz and beenz, and they got Whoopi Goldberg as their spokesperson, and that’s starting to sound a lot like Matt Damon doing cryptocurrency ads at the superbowl this year before those cratered, right?

I suppose we’ll see how long the IRS goes on auditing those when they mostly turn up losses that lower people’s tax liabilities.

I’ve also heard “Everything Bubble”. Since it has infected banking and even low end retail that mostly deals in toothpaste and underwear, like Walmart, I think maybe this is also a fair assessment.

However bad you think this will get, it’s going to be worse.

Walmart online delivery is turning into a major disaster thanks to Doordash.

Walmart online delivery is turning into a major disaster thanks to Doordash.

Today I had a $10 Gillette Mach 3 razor starter kit go missing. I should have just done store pickup since my spouse works there anyway.

But “Justine” “delivered” my order. And by delivered, I mean what normally happens with Walmart+ deliveries that go through Doordash instead of some real delivery company. I opened the door, looked everywhere in the apartment building and in all of the mail rooms, and couldn’t find it.

And when it said “Click here for picture.” it didn’t show me a picture, it just showed me the order, saying it was “delivered today”.

You never know what Walmart will decide to ship through FedEx or DoorDash, and so part of my order (the refill razor blades) are supposedly arriving on Thursday via FedEx.

In the mean time, I called Walmart and talked to a robot and told it my order went missing, and it resubmitted a replacement order (no additional charge). It’s not showing when that will be delivered, if it is delivered.

At least Amazon can deliver their packages. Haven’t had one go missing yet.

Talking to my spouse, I found out that with Doordash, a lot of Walmart orders go missing, and when I finally talked to a human at 1-800-WALMART, he said they get a lot of complaints about Doordash too.

If they want to compete with Amazon, they need a real delivery company where half the packages don’t go missing. Whoever is running Walmart today just doesn’t know how aggravating the customer experience really is and that they are literally throwing away business to Amazon Prime.

If I had just ordered the razors off Prime, they’d be here now, and I’d be happily shaving with them, but noooooo. Walmart sent half my order through ghetto Doordash and it was the part that I can’t use the other half without.

Why gas prices won’t go down anytime soon.

Not Public Radio has an article explaining why “Big Oil” won’t drill.

It’s basically nonsense.

It comes down to two main things, in my opinion.

1. They’re making record profits and margins leaving things exactly where they’re at now.
2. As a nice bonus, they think that if they can keep prices WAAAAY up, it will damage Biden and the Democrats and get them out of the government so that nobody will pass climate action or start making them pay income tax.

Once Trump (or someone like him, or an obstructionist Republican opposition in Congress) happens again, they can go right back to business as usual. With the added perk that they still don’t have to lower gas prices.

Gas prices are going to affect the labor market, long term, for obvious reasons. Including the fact that if people can no longer afford to get to work, wages are going to have to go way up to compensate, or there still won’t be anyone to hire.

It’s also going to affect the gig economy bullshit, like Uber, GrubHub, and DoorDash (which already abandons most Walmart+ deliveries due to low pay right now). We’ll probably see the collapse of this bubble very soon if gas prices don’t go down.

An Uber a few miles through Chicago is now $40-50, and you can make it the same distance on the bus for $2.

To go along with hideous levels of inflation, Walmart gives “Walmart+” to employees instead of a cost of living adjustment.

-/r/Walmart post about DoorDash contracting to deliver Walmart+ orders.

To go along with hideous levels of inflation, Walmart gives “Walmart+” to employees instead of a cost of living adjustment.

The employees at the local Walmart all had to attend a meeting today where it was stated that all Walmart employees get “free” Walmart+, which basically is free delivery of any size order to your house and 5 cents off per gallon of gasoline at Walmart or Murphy gas stations.

I guess it’s not nothing, but Walmart says that the Internal Revenue Code causes the “fair market value” of the Walmart+ subscription to be reported as taxable income.

So congratulations. Instead of a raise you got another way to spend money at Walmart, and you owe the government another $15-20 when you file your taxes next year.

Normally, it’s hard to look a gift horse in the mouth, but I doubt they’d be doing this unless they figured it benefited them more than you.

We’re already so tethered to Walmart at this point, it’s hard to shop anywhere else. Between the discount card (which works on some groceries, but not most) and the 5% back on my Capital One Walmart card for doing online orders, there’s hardly a point to shopping my groceries myself anymore, so I use the store pickup already.

The upside of having Walmart+ is marginal. I already know from Online Grocery Pickup employees talking about it that DoorDash drivers hate Walmart+ (verifiable through this article too) and they complain that they have to put groceries back that they’ve already picked and cancel the customer’s order all the time. Walmart probably pays more to have that happen than if they kicked a few more bucks to the drivers.

Walmart for their part says that a tip after some guy got $4 from them to deliver tons of groceries and a 50 pound bag of dog food up three flights of stairs is “optional”.

I just don’t see myself using it often unless I’m laid up in bed with the flu and absolutely cannot go out and pickup my own groceries, have an order for pickup that does not meet the $35 free pickup minimum and would normally be charged a $5.99 convenience fee (I’m there every day anyway, so this DOES happen), or an at Murphy filling up my gas tank and want to use the 5 cents a gallon off (in addition to my credit card, where gas always has 5% back).

The upside for an ethical person with Walmart+ is low. Ethics dictates a sizeable tip. Most Walmart customers are terrible people who don’t tip well, like the folks who already complain that their food arrived cold from restaurants with DoorDash. So the only ethical thing is tip or don’t use it.

With gas prices through the roof lately, I can’t imagine that Walmart+ isn’t on its last leg already.

If nobody wanted to make $4-5 taking a grocery order when gas cost $3 a gallon, who wants to do it with gas at $4.30 a gallon?

The whole thing is obviously in a death spiral because some manager at Walmart bought into this gig economy bullshit instead of paying a professional delivery driver in a Walmart truck to make the rounds (like Amazon Prime does).

And when we say “gig”, it’s a nice way of saying “slave”. People who work inside the store, for Walmart, make at least $17 an hour without having to drive all over the city not getting tips. They also don’t have to pay the employer share of social taxes at the end of the year.

The “app economy” has created a permanent underclass that cannot afford childcare (leading to Walmart warning that it won’t release orders to people with young children in the car) and do not make the legal minimum wage (which is $15 an hour in my state).

I’ve complained about these apps before, and how it’s dangerous for these “gig workers” from DoorDash to have their kids in the car.

Very recently, in the city I live in, a guy got into a running car and pointed a loaded handgun at a 16 year old in the back seat. A week before that, a guy stole a running vehicle and then ditched it a few miles later with some toddlers in it.

And you know how these app companies are. “We’re just a facilitator! You can’t sue us!”.

This is what comes out of San Francisco, folks. The most illiberal non-progressive system imaginable.

A return to plantations working slaves for subsistence living standards.

Corporate Troll Matthew “GAFAM” Garrett complains about computer devices called “master/slave” while using slave labor.

According to a Doordash driver on TikTok…

The way this normally happens, I’m told, is that if you don’t tip your driver, then your food sits there while driver after driver declines it.

Eventually, it goes up 50 cents per driver that declines it, and then someone takes your food and brings it to you, after about an hour.

Of course, Garrett is the corporate troll that implemented a scheme where Microsoft has to sign off on your bootloader or else your OS won’t boot on a PC, which he calls security.

But he’s also a self-proclaimed “Social Justice Warrior” always calling for people to be cancelled, and just generally whining and complaining. He’s one of the fake complainers about calling computer devices “master and slave”.

Apparently, they didn’t pay him enough to leave a tip for his Doordash slave driver. You know, 1099 workers, mostly minorities, making less than minimum wage, paying double social taxes to the IRS, no health insurance, have to have their kids in the car with them in Chicago during a carjacking spree….. Slavery!

He had to be muted on Techrights IRC because he kept direct messaging people, including me, to talk about sex in bizarre contexts.

Unfortunately, in some circles, people don’t know what a clown this guy is, and why they should laugh at him.

Popeyes Chicken decides to bill cram for dipping sauces. Doordash issues.

Because I spent all day waiting on my case to be called in traffic court, I had no time to make dinner, and decided to “outsource” to Popeyes Chicken on Lewis Ave, in Waukegan, Illinois, through Doordash.

This is the second time I’ve given Doordash a go and I was kind of disappointed with it, again. They make an estimate that your food can be to your door in 30 or 40 minutes and what usually happens is it takes more than an hour and it’s starting to get cold.

On top of that, Popeyes claims there’s no delivery fee until later this month, as part of a promo, but then adds 10% onto the price of the food if you choose Doordash. (Wendy’s was doing this too a couple of weeks ago.)

When I looked at my bill, I also noticed that the four dipping sauces that came with the meal, according to Popeyes, were billed at 58 cents per dipping sauce, adding $2.32 plus tax (8%) to my total.

A minor complaint, maybe, but I was still pretty upset since most restaurants that have chicken tenders/nuggets don’t bill you separately per-sauce, especially after claiming that it was part of the meal.

For the final total of $40, I don’t think I’ll be going to Popeyes again anytime soon.

Before the pandemic, the chicken was at least piping hot. It was juicy. It was plump. It might just be my imagination that fast food is going downhill, but I can’t imagine that it’s hit everything except McDonalds and that this is my imagination.

McDonalds has, at least, managed to uphold its usual quality level and assuaged the anger about inflation by slipping people coupons in their app.

And they don’t charge for dipping sauce.

When I looked further into the Popeyes issue, I found other customers on Reddit complaining about being dinged for dipping sauce, and mad that Popeyes is doing this when nobody else does.

Other restaurants might get skimpy with the sauce or ketchup, but if you say something about it, they’ll throw more in there, for no additional charge, to get you to go away and to keep the customer happy.

That’s just good customer service when you think about it. Dipping sauces and ketchup don’t really cost them a whole lot. Certainly less than a customer who goes “Geez, really? I won’t be going there again!”.

I think whoever is running this Popeyes is just getting really really tight.