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I have no comment on the valuation, but the service has made my life better. I no longer fight with my significant other about grocery store trips, and the hou

I have no comment on the valuation, but the service has made my life better. I no longer fight with my significant other about grocery store trips, and the house is always stocked with healthy, delicious food from Whole Foods. In 3 years, I'm not sure I've ever had a problem with an Instacart delivery, other than them occasionally forgetting items. edit: I should have mentioned that I'm not very picky about what is actually delivered, I'm just happy to have a bunch of fresh vegetables, fruit, and sparkling water stocked in my house at all times.

MegaButts 10y ago
As a counterpoint, I've never had a positive experience with Instacart. Whenever an item is missing (and sometimes I suspect they just can't find the item in store - one time they told me Whole Foods had no parmesan cheese at all), there is a frustrating back-and-forth texting frenzy to decide whether or not you want something else. Not only is it not what you want, it inevitably costs more, and a typical order will have something like a dozen texts from the shopper. In addition to this, the markups are way too high in my opinion. And since I'm not in the store, I never know what's on sale and can never take advantage of it. After about a half dozen tries I gave up on Instacart. It was so much worse than just going to the store myself.
- jabzd 10y ago
  For what it is anecdotally worth, this has gotten better. It launched in Chicago at least a year ago and the first few orders my wife and I placed, I felt like I should have shopped myself for how many items weren't found and how much hand holding the shopper needed to replace items. We almost gave up on it, but with a baby in the house my wife kept with it and the replacement feedback loop has really gotten much better. Nowadays, out of a 25 item order, maybe 1 item is replaced and usually without a back-and-forth necessary (something reasonable is picked and you have the opportunity to reject it). Also, luckily, in the Chicago market most of the stores are "same-price-as-in-store" and the prices seem fairly reasonable where I mostly believe that.
- CptJamesCook 10y ago
  You can set it so that they automatically replace the item with another option w/o communicating with you about it.
xenihn 10y ago
I don't know about you, but I love going grocery shopping, especially with a partner.
- blakes 10y ago
  Funny, my wife and I are the same way. We love grocery shopping together, we get a nice solid hour or so of walking together looking and talking about food. What's so bad about that?
stouset 10y ago
My biggest gripes with them include what you just mentioned. I usually order from them when I'm making a large meal with typically uncommon ingredients. Today I'm making Cuban — I needed Seville oranges for mojo, yuca, rice paper for turrón, etc. Instacart is a gamble for me, and the UI is frustrating. I want to search for several items across stores and see which ones have them all. Instead I have to try stores one by one and see what's in stock. It's not enough to get me to stop using them, but it is annoying. But the really frustrating thing is when they claim a store has an item, but the shopper doesn't have much incentive to spend time looking for those hard-to-find but critical items. So lots of my orders have missing items which I then have to go out and find myself anyway. Also bad is that many items are hard to order specific quantities of. Some common produce items are sold by the pound, when I really just need one two count (e.g., onions). Worse, some items are labeled "per unit" but when I order two, they're converted to a weight value and I get fewer than I ordered. Again necessitating a trip to the store. I acknowledge that most people aren't making the kinds of meals I'm doing, and not suggesting they cater to my admittedly small market segment. But if they solved these problems, they would be amazing instead of "slightly worth it".
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
bdcravens 10y ago
Interesting that even though we have Whole Foods here (though not nearly as many as other parts of the country) it's not an option, only HEB (large regional grocer in Texas) (I'm in Houston)

MegaButts 10y ago

As a counterpoint, I've never had a positive experience with Instacart. Whenever an item is missing (and sometimes I suspect they just can't find the item in store - one time they told me Whole Foods had no parmesan cheese at all), there is a frustrating back-and-forth texting frenzy to decide whether or not you want something else. Not only is it not what you want, it inevitably costs more, and a typical order will have something like a dozen texts from the shopper. In addition to this, the markups are way too high in my opinion. And since I'm not in the store, I never know what's on sale and can never take advantage of it. After about a half dozen tries I gave up on Instacart. It was so much worse than just going to the store myself.

jabzd 10y ago
For what it is anecdotally worth, this has gotten better. It launched in Chicago at least a year ago and the first few orders my wife and I placed, I felt like I should have shopped myself for how many items weren't found and how much hand holding the shopper needed to replace items. We almost gave up on it, but with a baby in the house my wife kept with it and the replacement feedback loop has really gotten much better. Nowadays, out of a 25 item order, maybe 1 item is replaced and usually without a back-and-forth necessary (something reasonable is picked and you have the opportunity to reject it). Also, luckily, in the Chicago market most of the stores are "same-price-as-in-store" and the prices seem fairly reasonable where I mostly believe that.
CptJamesCook 10y ago
You can set it so that they automatically replace the item with another option w/o communicating with you about it.

xenihn 10y ago

I don't know about you, but I love going grocery shopping, especially with a partner.

blakes 10y ago
Funny, my wife and I are the same way. We love grocery shopping together, we get a nice solid hour or so of walking together looking and talking about food. What's so bad about that?

stouset 10y ago

My biggest gripes with them include what you just mentioned. I usually order from them when I'm making a large meal with typically uncommon ingredients. Today I'm making Cuban — I needed Seville oranges for mojo, yuca, rice paper for turrón, etc. Instacart is a gamble for me, and the UI is frustrating. I want to search for several items across stores and see which ones have them all. Instead I have to try stores one by one and see what's in stock. It's not enough to get me to stop using them, but it is annoying. But the really frustrating thing is when they claim a store has an item, but the shopper doesn't have much incentive to spend time looking for those hard-to-find but critical items. So lots of my orders have missing items which I then have to go out and find myself anyway. Also bad is that many items are hard to order specific quantities of. Some common produce items are sold by the pound, when I really just need one two count (e.g., onions). Worse, some items are labeled "per unit" but when I order two, they're converted to a weight value and I get fewer than I ordered. Again necessitating a trip to the store. I acknowledge that most people aren't making the kinds of meals I'm doing, and not suggesting they cater to my admittedly small market segment. But if they solved these problems, they would be amazing instead of "slightly worth it".

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

bdcravens 10y ago

Interesting that even though we have Whole Foods here (though not nearly as many as other parts of the country) it's not an option, only HEB (large regional grocer in Texas) (I'm in Houston)