sweetgreen

My daughter - who has Celiac- asked me to drop off a Summer BBQ salad while she was coaching a camp. I tried to order online, but unlike so many other restaurants that have allergy indicators when ordering online, there is no way to convey an allergy. So I went in person to order, and was told that the salad is an online item only, so I couldn’t get it for her. When I explained my attempt to order online, but couldn’t relay the request for a glove change, the Mgr agreed to make it. However , I still needed to do the app order since he had no way to charge me for it via store register. So I proceeded step aside, download the app, set up an account, charge my credit card. I then had to wait for the Mgr to finish with another customer, then wait for the lag time that it took for my app order to show up on the store system. In all, I was there for over 35 minutes. FOR A SALAD. All because the app doesn’t an allergy indicator. Really aggravating that anyone with allergies is totally excluded from getting any “online only” options, or from ordering with the app at all!! Frustrating that just we discovered a place where we can get a quick, healthy, gluten free meal, we find out there is a whole world of convenience and menu options that we don’t have access to. In my experience, The employees are always great when it comes to prepping salads for those with allergies that order at the store , so I can’t imagine that they couldn’t handle prepping one because it was ordering online if given the proper notice.

I appreciate the convenience of being able to custom order online and avoid the line to pick up my order. The one drawback is that one evening the store I order from ran out of kale so they just didn’t make my order or even let me know that it was a problem for them until I walked in and couldn’t find my bowls on the pick-up shelf. There was a great deal of confusion about getting a credit issued and a new order placed, though those two things eventually happened. Unfortunately, my husband who expects the trains to always run on time was starving by then and wanted nothing to do with Sweet Green again. I also noticed that there were two big bunches of kale ready to be cut up so it seemed like the manager hadn’t allocated staff properly to keep food prep running smoothly. Another woman in line to make a new order had the same problem so anyone who wanted kale that evening was out of luck. This happened only once during the dinner hour. I order dinner online maybe twice a month and lunch about four times a month.

Until this update, sg was one of my fave apps for ordering food: I love the many, many options for order customization, the detailed item descriptions and topping images, and as a vegetarian, the ability to apply personal dietary restrictions as profile rules sets the bar for other meal order apps. On my first try, this latest version was a fail for me, though ... there is now no customer control over when to use rewards credit (and one has to use the app to order to get credit in the first place, which I have grumpily accepted). In my case, I have rewards dollars that don’t expire for three months, but they are automatically added in the app to my order with no option to ‘save for later’. Also, there is no notification that a store is closing soon - the app just kicks orders to the next day with no explanation if an order is made in the app within 30 minutes of a store’s closing. I understand that sg employees might want a half-hour buffer for app orders before a store’s closing - the app for a certain ubiquitous coffee shop does the same thing. But unlike said coffee shop app, there is no explanation that a store is closing soon and sg operation hours aren’t provided on the ordering page, so it’s easy to miss and really frustrating to go through the motions of making an sg order only to get to the order pick-up page and have ‘tomorrow’ as a customer’s first available option. How about a ‘closing soon’, sg?