Online grocery shopping can be a mixed bag, and not just for customers who like to add a little variety to their diet: There are a number of folks who’ve been left with items they never intended on purchasing because their personal shopper either took it upon themselves to make head-scratching product substitutions, or just simply didn’t care enough/take the time to properly fulfill the order.
But a TikTok posted by user Carolina Trevizo (@thecarolinatrevizo) seems to suggest that a misinterpretation of quantity nomenclature, at least on Walmart’s online shopping app, could be the root cause behind some of the bizarre orders customers receive.
In a viral clip that’s accrued over 72,000 views on the popular social media platform, Trevizo highlights one such confusing order for a customer who either really likes bananas, or had no idea that they were about to get potassium-bombed.
@thecarolinatrevizo Banana party? 🍌 🎉 #walmart #ogp #banana #bananabunch #fyp #fypシ #fypage ♬ original sound – MIKASA
Trevizo begins the video showing off the Walmart personal shopper item fulfillment order on her store-issued device. The order indicates that the customer requested a quantity of “10” bananas, and probably only thought that they were going to get 10 single bananas.
However, what they ordered were 10 individual hands, leaving the customer with anywhere from 40-60 bananas depending on how many pieces of the fruit were on each of the hands.
Trevizo writes in a text overlay of the video: “They definitely thought they were getting 10 bananas total…” and films herself pulling out a blue basket that’s filled with a quantity of bananas that would make Donkey Kong himself blush.
Apparently online ordering snafus are fairly common, judging by some of the other comments posted by folks who saw the video. Like this one TikToker who wrote: “my parents did this once in lockdown, ended up with 12 dozen eggs”
It seemed like parents had a lot of ordering woes when it came to shopping online: “My dad did this but with pre rolls lol. He didn’t realize it was a pack of 10 rolls and he bought 5 of them. 50 pre rolls”
One personal shopper said that they had a customer with the opposite problem. After calling about a substitution, they learned that the person they were getting groceries for actually wanted six hands of bananas.
“I had someone last week order 15kgs of oranges instead of 15 oranges,” another person said.
But there were folks who were hoping for some type of banana consistency when it came to ordering items online: “I dont even know what to order on the bananas. I’ve asked for 1 thinking I was going to get 1 bunch and literally got a single banana once….,” one TikTok user remarked.
And in case you’re wondering just how much all of those bananas cost the customer, if they did only want 10 bananas, they were willing to pay a heck of a lot for them, because Trevizo wrote: “Theyre 67 cents a pound and they weighed 25 lbs… so they paid almost $17 for just bananas”
For years, there have been conversations in the supermarket retail economy space that highlighted an “explosion” of shoppers shifting to online grocery fulfillment. In 2020, CNBC wrote that 83% of people during the height of COVID-19 pandemic ordering had issues with their online grocery orders. The outlet went on to say that nearly 75% of all shoppers preferred visiting supermarkets in person. The following year, Gallup reported that more and more consumers were embracing online shopping, showing significant differences in several key categories between 2019 and 2021. Sixty-four percent of people said they never shopped for groceries online in 2021, while in 2019 that number was at 81%, for instance.
There’s also no shortage of “Instacart fails” and bizarre substitutions that personal shoppers have made on behalf of customers on social media. Like this person who got an “entire side of salmon” that they “never asked for,” and folks who received wildly different items from what they originally ordered on the platform: Like another shopper who asked for an electric toothbrush and got a no-frills store brand bottle of mouthwash instead.
The Daily Dot has reached out to Walmart via email and Trevizo via TikTok comment for further information.
