When Howsers IGA’s weekly grocery delivery arrived on the barge from Seattle on June 21, all of the dairy, eggs, chilled meat and frozen foods it had ordered were not on board – the distributor had missed the sailing.

Over the weekend, co-owner Mike Ward learned that his distributor, United Natural Foods, had brought the order – which he valued at around $30,000 – from its warehouse to the Alaska Marine Lines terminal in Seattle after the barge had already departed. United Foods failed to notify Ward, and the distributor still hadn’t talked with Howsers’ sales rep as of Monday.

“You don’t want to print the words I’d use to describe this situation,” store manager Kevin Shove said last week.

Ward was at his grocery store in Wrangell when he got word of what had happened. He brought six cases of chilled beef with him from Wrangell’s storeroom to fill the gap. He said he thought the Haines store would have enough frozen inventory to “skimp by” for one week, but by Monday it was entirely out of eggs and milk gallons.

The missing order also affected Ward’s convenience store, Haines Quick Shop.

Ward has observed a dramatic increase in delivery mishaps over the past few years, both in Haines and Wrangell, and has heard about similar situations at Foodland in Juneau, also an IGA store.

He believes the problems began when United Foods acquired his former distributor, SuperValu, in 2019 and moved its warehouse four hours south from Tacoma to Centralia, Washington.

“There’s a problem almost every week,” he said. “They put the wrong people’s product in the wrong van all the time. They’ll leave a pallet of milk sitting there, miss the van and then they’ll send it the next week when it’s outdated. It’s just amazing what’s going on right now.”

Last year, AML called Ward the week of the Southeast Alaska State Fair to tell him that his entire order had missed the barge. Ward managed to hire a freight truck last-minute to bring the groceries to town by highway, but that cost $20,000. Transporting the groceries on an AML barge costs $6,000 a week.

Despite these past experiences, Ward said this week’s blunder “takes the cake.”

He said he might consider changing distributors if there were more to choose from, but the SuperValu acquisition practically eliminated competition. Now, Ward said the only supplier option besides United Foods is Carr Gottstein, Safeway’s Alaska supplier. He hasn’t been tempted to switch because they don’t stock as wide a variety of products, but he has also heard that they don’t have as many delivery issues.

Olerud’s also contracts with United Foods. It received its dairy and chilled meat last week, but its frozen foods never appeared.

Olerud’s co-owner Sarah Swinton confirmed Ward’s observation about the uptick in delivery mix-ups. “There’s always a problem,” she said. Last week, it was her health and beauty aids order that never showed up. She said she assumes she’ll receive both frozen orders next week since her store was already billed.

Mountain Market uses a different distributor, and last week its order arrived without a hitch. But grocery manager Kim Rosado said that twice in the past two months she’s unloaded a week’s delivery to find an entire pallet of dry groceries – one third of the weekly order – gone. “They said they sent it, but we never got it,” she said.

“There’s nothing you can do besides just make it look good on the shelves as best you can,” she said.

Rosado said she thinks in both cases the pallet either never left the warehouse, or it got delivered to another store elsewhere in the state. She said Mountain Market regularly receives goods marked for other stores.

Like Ward, Rosado speculated that delivery problems arise in the warehouse. She pointed both to the national labor shortage and to a sudden increase in demand from stores. Rosado said her weekly orders have ballooned in the past few months. “We’re all busier, (so) our orders are way bigger” than they were at the beginning of the pandemic, she said.

Mountain Market co-owner Mike Borcik said he thinks all Alaska store owners have to a certain degree resigned themselves to such errors. Many years ago, he said, an entire week’s order ended up in Guam instead of Haines.