Good Eggs delivery debacle leaves people scrambling for Thanksgiving dinner

A couple weeks before Thanksgiving, a San Francisco-based grocery delivery start-up boasted of securing 3,700 turkeys, which would eventually arrive on its customers’ doorsteps and make their way to festive dinner tables around the Bay Area.

One problem: Few of those birds, along with their accompanying side dishes, made it out of the warehouse in time for Thursday evening’s meal.

Customers who ordered their Thanksgiving feasts from Good Eggs, which advertises “absurdly fresh groceries, delivered,” were forced to go empty-handed or fend for themselves when the company’s scheduled deliveries never arrived. The delivery debacle can be traced back to a system outage in the company’s warehouse Wednesday morning, according to chief executive Bentley Hall, who issued a statement in a series of posts on social media.

“Once the system was back up and running, we were too optimistic about the how long it would take to fully catch up and get all of your orders out the door,” Hall said, in part. “We are devastated that we let some of you down. We will do everything we can to make it right.”

Hall, who joined the company and took over as CEO in 2015, said he was “deeply disappointed by our failure to deliver all of our Thanksgiving groceries,” and that he spent “30-plus hours in a row” loading orders on the warehouse floor.

By Wednesday, however, customers were already beginning to notice delayed delivery times.

Hundreds of posts on social media documented customers’ confusion evolving into dismay as delivery estimates extended further beyond their scheduled window.

One user said their “elderly, high-risk parents scheduled an order two weeks ago” and stayed up until 2 a.m. Wednesday so as not to miss their box of Thanksgiving goodies. “Nothing ever came,” they wrote.