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| August's Harvest Thinking of using August's Harvest? Perhaps you want to think again! Internet, Ontario |
| 20th of Oct, 2011 by User430357 |
I picked up my last box of vegetables from the August Harvest (http://www.augustsharvest.com) and it is time to provide my critique of this truly appalling program. I send this out in the hopes that it stops somebody else from being
ripped off by this company, at least if you do decide to join you can do so with your eyes wide open. The idea is to sign up in the spring, and prepay for a weekly delivery (to a place close by, not to our home) of locally grown, organic vegetables. Now we don't typically purchase organic, not that I'm against it but it is often ridiculously expensive, but I am about locally grown and so I took a chance. Sue was quite concerned that we get saddled with a bunch of vegetables we'd never eat so she insisted that we take the $50/week option of being able to choose our own from a list each week (as opposed to the $35/week option that lets them choose what to provide). If we were to spend that $50/week on vegetables at Costco we'd have more than enough to feed the whole family and while I didn't really expect that to be the case with this service, I did expect that we'd only have a bit of extra stuff to buy once in a while. From the very first week, however, I realized that I'd been had and as it was prepaid there was nothing I could do about it. The first batch of vegetables was pathetically small, we literally paid $1.25 each for four potatoes and $5 for a single tomato...$5 for ONE TOMATO! Wow, the balls on these people are whoppers! But that, unfortunately, was
not the worst of this experience. The food we did get was often of quite poor quality, the herbs were woody, the melons where overripe, and the selection was awful! Week after week I found myself ordering things we really don't want because there was absolutely nothing else we could order. Now in my mind, if somebody prepays TOP DOLLAR for food, they should be receiving the best food available. What was abundantly clear, however, is that we were at the bottom of the list ... I guess they figured they had our money and
didn't need to worry about quality. I also assumed that prepaying as we did, cutting out the middle man and “Sharing the risk of a growing season†would mean that we would be getting the best possible prices for things but as we found out, that was the furthest thing from the truth. The best example I can come up with is the “extras†we were asked to consider to purchase, in particular the Organic milk. A quart of this milk was offered to us with a $0.02 discount off of the price (of $6.05/litre) found in the downtown Covent Garden Market, probably the most expensive place to buy food within the entire city of London Ontario. WTF? We buy 4 litres of milk from Costco at $4.59, who the hell can afford these prices???? What I think happened is a classic bait-and-switch ... the program is painted as a shared harvest but in reality all we had was a different middleman (Augusts Harvest) who had piss-poor purchasing power and got the dregs from local farmers which, of course, was passed on to saps like me. And on top of it all, at least 4 times out of the 18 weeks (almost 25%) we didn't even get the items we ordered, instead random substitutions were provided. The first time we ended up with 6 quarts of really tiny strawberries, even strawberry lovers can't eat that much in a week and,
of course, the quality of the fruit after a week was such that we had to make a jam/puree or we'd have been throwing it all out. So to recap: Stupidly expensive: $5 tomato, $1.25 potato, $1.25 for a single hot pepper, and this final week provided me with 5 SMALL apples for $4.17!! Poor food quality: overripe melons, absolutely filthy lettuce (wash them six times and there is still sand mixed in), carrots so small that if you peeled them you'd have nothing left to eat, herbs picked well beyond their best-before date Lousy selection: if you like Garlic, Kale, and Swish Chard then you might like these folks (you could get as much as you wanted of that stuff) but if you want normal vegetables like tomatos, peppers, broccoli then you are out of luck ... you'd be lucky to get a single, small broccoli (like this week) which cost $50/12 = $4.17, at least 3 times what it would cost me at the neighbourhood grocery store and more than 4 times what I could get from Costco Poor customer service: You are supposed to treat those who pay the most better than those who pay the least, if that was the case then I truly feel for those who took the “default†option! ... if you have to substitute my choices then why not give me a call / email and ask what I'd like as a substitute? After all, I'm paying top dollar here, even over top of your regular customers!!! I have rarely felt so ripped off and taken advantage of. These folks use words like “Community†and “Sharing†in all their marketing but what they provided was simply a good example of Caveat Emptor (let the buyer beware). So, if you are thinking about doing this next year I suggest you look to some other place than these folks, unless you like getting
it up the a**!
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