This week my main medium seems to be postcards. I haven’t yet figured out the best way to talk about those. Probably shouldn’t put my handwriting on the internet?
I’ve also posted another update to the grocery bag saga, which is about not just environmental waste and food safety but also workers’ rights under capitalism. This week I’ll try including the full update here in this post, which is duplicative but maybe more helpful than just a link to the project page? No clue if the formatting will hold in the email. On verra.
Escalation (13 August 2026)
No one “internal” to Metro has gotten back to me. My latest email:
I have still not received a refund for the [X] unused days of the [Y]-day delivery pass I paid for, and Metro’s legal department has not yet returned my phone call.
Let me be very clear: if the Metro corporation requires me to enlist a court to explain that Metro does not have the legal right to unilaterally change the terms of its subscription service and then refuse to refund customers who object, I will be seeking more than [X/Y x cost] plus tax.
Also a distressing update on the replacement grocery delivery service I tried on August 4.
I had phoned the replacement service’s call centre that day when my picked order went undelivered throughout the entire delivery window, to try to get my order delivered and also to understand what happened. I was told the issue would be escalated, and over the next few days I got a few emails that said nothing useful (including “your feedback has been shared with the appropriate department for immediate attention” and “your feedback has been documented and will be taken into consideration to help improve our service and prevent similar issues from occurring in the future”).
Given the purpose of escalation, I asked for specifics. Why was the perfect order that was picked before 9 am not delivered by 10? Why was it necessary for a second order to be picked, with substitutions and missing items, and only delivered after 11? What was the actual problem in the chain and how can it be addressed to prevent this issue in the future?
The latest email from customer service ran through a partial chronology. It seems the driver who actually succeeded in delivering my items got the subcontract somewhere between 10:20 and 10:45, two hours after the original order was picked, half an hour after the delivery window ended, and corporate’s solution to “the inconvenience caused” was to ban that driver from their platform.
This is, to understate things, fucked up. The driver was not responsible for the shitshow. This response is corporate scapegoating, with disregard for gig-workers’ ability to feed themselves.
Are other customers satisfied with this kind of response? Nothing will get better next time, but at least someone got beheaded? Most people, I know, just don’t have the time and energy to fight these battles.
I called the replacement service’s phone line again this morning, to communicate that banning the driver from the platform was not the solution and the driver should be reinstated. Will that happen? I don’t know, but my feedback has been escalated.
I asked today’s agent a few operational questions to try to pinpoint where the actual problem was that day (again: not the driver) and she sounded like she desperately wanted to get off the phone. So then I started worrying that my inquiries about how things work would get her fired too. Don’t ask questions, is the message I’m getting. Innocent low-wage people will be blamed.