I'm pretty sure I also self-assigned myself the same job recently. Opened the guidelines and realize I am told what kind of food to order, which I thought was annoying but that I like a lot of different kinds of food and would probably be assigned one I would enjoy. Nope. My assigned type of food was "healthy". I would have preferred ANY other food choice. Then to make matters worse, I found no further instruction on what kinds of foods are in the "healthy" category, and when I searched on the app I was to use to order the food for "healthy", the results contained produce from my local grocery store. No restaurants. There also wasn't a "healthy" category when tried to find where I needed to order from by browsing by category. I emailed my scheduler, no answer. Ended up having to just accept the flake citation because I honestly don't even think I could have completed the shop if I wanted to since I couldn't find a single option to order healthy food from.
I was pretty upset. Like you said, it was simply only worth the free meal. Add in the fact they didn't disclose that I'd be assigned to a specific type of food to order before accepting the job, followed by not responding to my emails forcing me to flake, it is totally unprofessional. Especially due to the fact that it wasn't like I simply didn't want to do the job because of my assigned category, I simply could not complete the shop because I couldn't find where to order from that was in my category. Although I wasn't happy to receive the healthy option, I would have completed the shop regardless of that because I always try to complete a job once I've committed to it, so if I would have just received an answer, they'd have a completed shop and I'd have zero flake citations. I keep seeing tons of these shops posted and I assume I'll keep seeing them spam the job board. I've noticed that they have added to the description to "read the sticky note" like that helps. I guarantee they'll have this happen to a bunch of shoppers before catching on.