What Walmart doesn't get that Amazon does

About eight months ago I decided to take a flyer on a promotional deal by Walmart. There's a store near my house where I do a lot of grocery shopping and used to pick up the staples I need. The chain’s promotional deal was that for $9 a month I could get unlimited and free deliveries of anything ordered from the store or online. Plus a few other bells and whistles like discounted gas at their stations, wherever those are.

I gave it a go, thinking that the six hours or so I spend shopping there every month is time that I would love to recapture for $9. What a deal.

Since starting the service, I have found it harder and harder to waste the 60 to 90 minutes driving to the store and actually doing a significant shopping haul, checking out after a long wait in line and scanning everything myself, loading my car and then driving home and unpacking. Grocery shopping at Walmart makes going to the dentist feel comforting.

Yet nearly every time I use Walmart’s delivery service to get a home delivery—probably six to eight times a month—something goes wrong.

Tonight, I received a delightful four bags of cat food, even though I don't have a cat. And a shopping bag full of meditation candles. I could use those right now.

As always, I selected the option online to let me sign for the order, so I can check for errors, and return the gobs of plastic bags from the previous delivery. Yet the Uber drivers delivering for Walmart virtually never follow those directions, but instead just leave bags on the porch. So I have a car trunk full of plastic Walmart grocery bags. (Can we dispense with that environmental disaster please?)

I called the local store and get help. The first person I spoke with (there’s no dedicated selection for delivery questions) transferred me to “the right department.” That second person must have been new to the job. He sadly had no customer service skill. He said he’d track down the right person, and left me on hold for 12 minutes. So I used that time to write this article.

I then spoke with a lovely helpful woman named Ubah. She was kind and empathic. But when she tried to look up my order, she couldn’t because her computer was down.

I won’t get my groceries tonight. I wasted 27 minutes on the phone with Walmart. Someone else won’t get their kitty food. Or meditation candles.

Somehow, Amazon has this all figured out. When I have a problem with anything, I can call Amazon and get someone to help right off the bat, even though it’s a company with 1.5 million employees and God knows how many hundreds of millions of customer and billions of transactions. I got through instantly to a live human being the day after Christmas. Amazon takes returns instantly. A few months ago they extended my Audible service for an extra month, free.

The difference between Amazon and Walmart? Amazon was built upon a foundation of customer obsession. Walmart was built upon an optimized global supply chain to cut costs.

And it’s pretty much that simple. In the retail wars, you get what you pay for most of the time. Except tonight, I didn’t get anything I’d paid for. Nor did another shopper somewhere.?Hopefully the mess isn’t leaving a hungry kitty.?