GIANT Food Stores +4

Why update in the middle of a pandemic???

The app was working just fine and then they did updates. I spent 2 hours on hold to find that Peapod could see my order even though I could no longer access it through the Giant app. Then there was no receipt on the day I picked up the order because apparently the system was down. I was able to place a new order and all seemed somewhat back to normal then yesterday I started getting an odd msg that says hmmm we are unable to open as it’s under maintenance! Now I can’t see or alter my order once again. And the last email is showing the wrong order as I’ve updated since then!! I am so upset right now! If I get the wrong food or no food at all I’m going to lose my patience completely And stop shopping at Giant entirely!!! Seriously get the app up and running like it was before you felt the need to “improve” things. Things were fine until you touched it!! Again during a crisis is not the time to risk changing. Extremely disappointed!!😡

Resposta do desenvolvedor ,

We sincerely apologize for the issues you encountered with our app. Please uninstall and reinstall to correct the "Down for Maintenance" screen. Our developers are currently working to fix this problem. Thank you for allowing us to serve you.

Doesn’t Work

I was super excited to try this app as I love the one that Sam’s club uses. Bypassing the register at the end of shopping is a premium experience, even if you sacrifice some annoyance of scanning each item as you walk through the store.

This app, however, is garbage. Initially, once stepping in the store, you have to connect to their WiFi, which was a little annoying but whatever. My first experience, I immediately noted that you cannot use it for produce, there is no option to input produce numbers / lookup items. The app tells you to set them aside and add them once at the register. I also noted that there’s no option to say you have multiple of things (we had 4 cans of tuna, had to scan each individual-not a massive inconvenience but I’ve used other similar apps that allow you to enter quantity)

The absolute kicker though, was getting to the register, pulling up the barcode, only for it to, of course not scan. I turned my phone around and increased the brightness, and immediately after doing that, the barcode disappeared. When I tried to bring it back up I got some generic message saying my trip wasn’t validated or something. I asked the girl at checkout and she had never seen the error before. I closed the app, and was not shocked to find that when I when I went back in it had deleted everything from my cart. Had to scan everything all over again. Was not amused.

Nowhere to enable notifications

Unlike the Peapod app (Peapod is still technically the vendor handling delivery for Giant), this app has no means to enable iOS push notifications. Frustratingly the app itself recommends us to “enable notifications,” yet there’s no way to do so. So if one is expecting a delivery, the only notifications we will receive come from outside the app, via txt or email messaging, both of which rely on protocols that are subject to delays and interference (e.g., text service limits, email spam filtration and server delays etc.). The Peapod app which we were obliged to use previously before Giant’s behind-the-scenes grand unification of their online shopping services began was much better at keeping users alerted at every step of the fulfillment process. Not so with this replacement.

Giant is very enthused about using this app for their new in-store shopping / pickup services, but they seem to have lost track of the app’s alternate use for home delivery, ironically during a time of COVID lockdowns when home delivery is much more essential to online food shoppers. Somewhere the clumsy marriage between Giant’s in-store and Peapod departments (each with different inventories and thus business goals) is failing as evidenced by this app’s failure to implement the most basic of functions: push notifications. My guess is no one knows who gets priority to use this feature: Giant’s physical stores or Peapod. As a result, neither do.