Joe R.

First off, the system for Instacart is quite frankly garbage. The moment I signed up a year ago, it was SO difficult to change anything. Not to mention, when you try to cancel your subscription, you have to go through a maze of tabs just to figure out which one it is. If there is one thing Instacart was smart at doing it was making it difficult for people to cancel because they know how furious people get already when they start the service. But hey, maybe I'm just dumb and the type of person who goes to their "Account" tab first when trying to manage any subscriptions.

Secondly, most of the time, when I did order things, the person getting the items would get it wrong AND/OR be too lazy to get the entire order and mark things as "not available". The person gathering the items would deliberately reduce or refuse to gather the amount requested. I get it, 10lbs or more of chicken or beef is a lot to carry around but c'mon, do your job. And while there are no repercussions for the person getting the items since they get to hide behind a cell phone screen, there are people out there who possibly can't go out and get their groceries. Maybe they don't have a car or disabled, or something else, but at least make SOME effort.

Thirdly, the tipping system is pretty bad. Maybe the person getting the items would make more of an effort if they knew that the TIPS that Instacart allows at the end of your order, was actually going to them and not the driver. Then maybe this review would be different. But why would I tip the driver for delivery of only half or a quarter of my items that they didn't even get? Not to mention, the driver ISNT even the same person gathering the items. Now maybe if the person getting the items was ALSO the person delivering the items, then I get the "delivery" tipping service but why tip someone who isn't even doing anything and just being a chauffeur? That's like me doing DoorDash, having the restaurant bring ME the items that are needed to be delivered and then I go to the customer's house with said delivery and the customer tips me. That makes absolutely 0 sense and yet that's the system that Instacart has got going on. The person prepping the food or order should get the tips.

Don't get me wrong, there are some good, hard-working people who work for instacart. I'd say 20% of my orders overall did a little above-average job when gathering my orders. They would call and double-check before they finalized the order. And to those hard-working people, I can only hope that you find a better paying job that will use those skills better because 80% of the people I placed orders with were just terrible. It boggles my mind to think that 80% of people just do not care and don't really do their job. You know, the job that they are getting paid to do already, which from my understanding is pretty good money already for this low-level experience job.