Vinny P.

Quick home delivery of online grocery orders from local supermarkets and other related shops. Well... Great concept, but totally inept and very poor execution!

I tried Instacart today for first time, for grocery deliveries from each of two supermarkets, and it was TERRIBLE!

I live in a rural area, on a winding country road in a forested valley/canyon and both drivers got HOPELESSLY LOST (and one order was late), because the Instacart smartphone navigation system was totally incorrect regarding where it showed the location of my house. I wasted one hour standing in the cold outside, flagging drivers, and also guiding them by phone when they called to beg for help.

Instacart, please give your drivers nav systems that are accurate. My experience today with both of your drivers was a nightmare! You wasted an hour of my time.

There are also flaws with the catalog pages of products offered by supermarkets on the Instacart website, as most listings for grocery and produce items bear no photo at all, or worse, bear only a stock photo from a stock photo house, and the product descriptions (i. E., for cat litter, for fresh tomatoes, for organic fresh tomatoes( are terribly cryptic, sparse and lacking.

Worse, the ordering catalog pages also offer no feedback as to whether the product is in stock or out of stock. In my case, for my grocery orders from two supermarkets, it turned out that 40% of the items that I ordered were out of stock, and for one item, a box of high-end organic dark chocolate bars, the supermarket staff advised the shopper/driver that the product had been discontinued 18 months ago, a fact which the manufacturer of the product later confirmed to me! REALLY? Instacart, you really cannot do better than that?

Instacart also offered me free delivery on my first order as a first-time customer, and then after I placed the order, they went ahead and charged me $11 for delivery anyway; no free delivery! Amazing arrogance!

Instacart also needs to start employing, as drivers, only professional drivers who have been trained as professional drivers. Both of my delivery drivers today were totally inept and inexperienced urban/city young women who had no training in how to find addresses outside of cities, nor in how to figure out when your nav system is giving you totally incorrect information, and to realize that it might be time to trust the directions given by the customer, and to also read street addresses on the house that they are driving past.

One of my two drivers today was so badly misled by her Instacart-supplied nav system that she passed my house by 1.4 miles, and turned down an incredibly tiny, narrow and bumpy country dirt road, in an area here in the Appalachian mountains that is heavily infested with rattlesnakes and Eastern black bears, as well as home to hostile rednecks and moonshiners whose first reaction is to kill outsiders who wander down their dirt roads. She coulda gotten herself killed, all thanks to her Instacart nav system!

The sole positive thing about my experience today with Instacart was that both shoppers/drivers exercised great care and common sense in carrying out their supermarket shopping duties. But neither was a professionally-trained driver, and they allowed their nav systems, and ineptitude, to get them totally lost!