Customer Claims Instacart Shopper Tried to Replace Bread With Mechanical Pencils

If you frequently use personal shopping applications like Instacart in order to pay someone to take care of your errands for you, then you've probably come across a problem that many folks complain about on social media: weird substitutions.

You might have decided to nip this type of mix-up from happening to you from the get-go by heading into your settings in order to ensure that you never fall prey to the unwanted switcheroo.

Because if you don't, you may just end up with a bunch of items from the grocery store/retailer you asked your driver to frequent on your behalf, that you never wanted in the first place.

This is what appears to have happened to TikToker @schultz8702, who posted a trending TikTok about their experience with Instacart after ordering through the popular delivery application.

Schultz shared a screenshot of a recommended substitution from the Instacart delivery driver handling their order. The TikTok user, as part of their order, asked for two loaves of D'Italiano Italian sliced bread.

According to the image grab, two packs of the product came out to a total of $8.18. But it would appear that the Instacart driver either couldn't locate the item in stores or that they ran out of it.

Common sense would dictate that a delivery driver would probably grab another type of sliced bread and as if the other brand would be a sufficient substitution in this instance.

However, it seemed that they decided Schultz just wanted to spend around $8.18 for their order, and didn't really care what item they were getting tossed in their cart.

That's because the recommended substitution provided by the Instacart driver was actually 2 packs of Bic mechanical pencils.

Seriously.

Schultz pens in a text overlay of the video: "When your Instacart shopper really wants you to buy mechanical pencils instead of bread"

What's strange is that judging from the follow-up screenshots of the conversation between Schultz and the Instacart driver, it seemed that the personal shopper didn't seem to think that there was anything wrong with this substitution.

"Mechanical pencils LOL," the TikToker messaged the driver.

"Would you want those added?" they asked

"No you replaced the bread with mechanical pencils," Schultz replied.

"Do you see you have pencils instead of bread," the TikToker said in a follow-up text, before continuing, "It's asking me to approve pencils"

They then provided a screenshot of the pop-up they received on the Instagram application.

Still, the personal shopper didn't seem to see what the problem was with their recommended substitution: "Instead of bread you want the pencils?" they asked.

A voice-over in the video reads: "I don't want you f----- pencils," followed by a man sternly saying: "no!"

In the comments section of the video, there were other users who said that they, too, experienced issues with Instacart shoppers coming up with off-the-wall substitutions.

One person wrote: "My shopper was at Costco and they were out of canned chicken. He replaced it with chicken of the sea, tuna."

And another said: "This is worse than the time my shopper replaced multivitamins with melatonin gummies."

However, there were some commenters who provided logical explanations as to why this could be the case: barcode scanning errors. One TikToker penned: "Was it a wrong barcode maybe? this happens on shipt a lot. it'll say one thing but the picture is completely different"

"Oh! The app glitches and does this sometimes. it's super annoying but I'll bet you the shopper was holding a different loaf of bread not pencils," someone else said.

While another wrote: "Sometimes the store barcodes don’t match up I tried to swap brands of pepperoni, and it popped up as dish detergent"

Have you ever had this happen to you when using home delivery applications like Instacart?