12 ms·

Some Instacart workers to strike over pay that can be as low as $1 per hour

132 points by gscott 9y ago

Nicholas790000 9y ago
COMPOSITE HACKS • If Truly you Are In Need Of A PROFESSIONAL HACKER Who Will Get Your Job Done Efficiently With Swift Response, You Have Met the Right Person. MOTIVE: • I don't care how technical the target is, The reason why I am hired is to simply get the job done however, I engage in"silent" attacks so the target remains unaware of the hack. MY HACKING CAPABILITIES: There are series of people who needs to Hack their target email I.D, social media websites,apps or smartphones, for many reasons such as husband cheating on wife, girlfriend cheating on boyfriend or vice versa. Or important information needed to be dumped/sniffed from the target email address, website, a particular location, or for whatsoever reason you want to hire a Hacker Or As a parent you might need to monitor what your children are doing on social media and on their personal computers so that they don’t get into trouble. Or if you want to hack a private domain email account(business email), or you want to eraze your name from court’s criminal records, perhaps you might want to Hack into the database of any government agency, All these are what I can get done within few hours. Frankly speaking, I always give a 100% guarantee on any job I am been asked to do, because I have always been successful in Almost all my jobs for the past 10years and my clients can testify to that . To hack anything needs time though, but I can provide a swift response to your job depending on how fast and urgent you need. Time also depends on what exactly you want to hack and how serious you are. Enough time with social engineering is required for hacking. So if you want to bind me in a short time, then just don't contact me because I can't hack within one hour,sorry. Basically, time depends on your luck. If its good luck, then it is possible to hack within one hour but, if its in the other way round, it would take few hours. I have seen FAKE HACKERS claiming they can hack in 1hr , but there is no REAL HACKER who can say this (AVOID THEM). If your target account is Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, sexual accounts or other social accounts, Bitcoin wallets, etc, or you want to hack into someones smartphone so you can monitor their calls, read their messages, chats, and social account activities without their notice, Or you wana track someone’s location, Or you want to retrieve lost files,messages, feel free to contact me, we would have a nice deal! I will explain to you how I am going to get the job done. You can also contact me for other Cyber Attacks And Hijackings, i do almost All Any binary options scam victims that is eager to recover lost money can also reach out to me, I'm Always ready to Help. compositehacks@gmail.com
PhantomGremlin 9y ago
Back in the old days, when we actually manufactured clothing in this country, there was this concept of "piece work". You weren't paid by the hour, but instead by your work output. E.g. if you were performing some sewing step on a blouse, such as adding buttons, you might be paid $0.25 per blouse for that work step. Of course employers tried to cheat, by setting the per-piece rate very low. You had to process many pieces to get a reasonable wage. The Federal government was forced to step in. They required monitoring of all this activity so that "all employees, including piece work employees, earn at least the minimum wage."[1] If only the people running the sweatshops in the old days thought to call their people "contractors" instead of "employees". They could have avoided most of the pesky regulation. I'm being sarcastic. Clearly those people were employees under any reasonable definition. Same should apply here. This whole gig economy crap has gotten totally out of hand. Fundamentally, an Instacart worker only has flexibility of when to work. The rest is more-or-less predetermined. Should that person be a contractor instead of an employee because he has his choice of the order in which to traverse the supermarket aisles? Should that person be a contractor because he has his choice of which streets to drive on from store to destination? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piece_work#Minimum_wage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piece_work#Minimum_wage
- themagician 9y ago
  It’s precisely BECAUSE the law hasn’t caught up that most of these exist the way that they do at all. Instacart, Postmates, Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, etc. all make profit on the gap between what they pay and what the regulated equivalent pays. Their big competitive advantage is just lower costs by completely ignoring the law. We talk about “innovation” but then these services mostly operate on not paying employees, insurance, benefits, licensing, etc. If I stop paying taxes and declare my consultancy a religion does that make my innovative? I’m instantly 40% more profitable than the next guy. You can “donate” via a mobile app too! It’s not a payment, it’s a donation. Please note the donation must be as it states on the invoic... err, donation services document.
  - rileymat2 9y ago
    With respect to Uber, the user experience is far better than a taxi cab. I would pay taxi cab prices for its level of service.
TaylorAlexander 9y ago
I recently ordered from DoorDash, a similar service. The app gave me a price for the order and then had a line item called “Dasher Tip” and asked me how much I wanted to put down. I put in $20. Later when the woman arrived with the food, we stopped to talk for a minute. She was a little younger than my mom, and said she had just started working for the service after her husband died. She asked me if she could ask me an awkward question, but I said okay. She wanted to know how much I had tipped her. $20. She showed me her phone with the app on our order. DoorDash told her we had tipped her $6, which she thought was suspiciously low (we ordered $90 in food). TL;DR: DoorDash presented me with an optional field called “Dasher Tip”, which I wasn’t sure of but assumed this was the Tip for the woman bringing us the food. I paid $20 for this “tip” but only $6 made it to the woman (whose husband had died). Incidentally I offered her a cash tip but she refused - she said I had already paid it and it should come from DoorDash. Last night my friends wanted to order food again. I called it in to the restaurant and we picked it up. I don’t want to use DoorDash anymore.
- cylinder 9y ago
  The psychopaths are running the show now. I don't use any of these nonsense delivery apps.
  - dzonga 9y ago
    VC money can't make up for their weak numbers and incompetence. They gotta push up revenue in other ways.
    - narrator 9y ago
      The delivery business is wildly unprofitable and just runs on VC money. As soon as this economic cycle is all over they'll probably all be out of business.
      - jjeaff 9y ago
        Ya, there is this ridiculous notion that, like Uber, you can just subsidize until they've run everyone else out of the market. But in reality, if Uber or door dash or whoever take over their respective markets and then back up prices, people will stop using them just as quickly as they started and smaller, cheaper competitors will pop right back up. You don't exactly need a multi-million dollar war chest to start delivering food.
spo81rty 9y ago
What I don't understand is if the pay or working conditions are so bad, why don't people just go find a new job? If they can't get anyone to do the job, they will be forced to pay more or fix the conditions. If they have a terrible reputation, nobody will want to work for them. It's simple supply and demand.
- grandalf 9y ago
  Maybe the average pay is $15/hour. We are not given enough data to estimate whether striking is rational.
- tabeth 9y ago
  It boggles me that anyone believes this. It's called leverage. Not everyone has equal ability, nor equal ability to change jobs for a variety of reasons.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - conanbatt 9y ago
    So what do you think happens to those people if by a requirment on minimum income by instacart, they are barred from that job opportunity.
- davidcbc 9y ago
  Because finding a low skill job is pretty hard. Not everyone has the luxury of choice.
  - fpisfun 9y ago
    I've never seen this to be the case that finding a low skill job is hard. In my area tons of people refuse to work but all kinds of places are constantly hiring like restaurants, etc. Many may require passing a drug screen though which it seems most people aren't able to do.
grandalf 9y ago
The gig economy is always going to be more volatile than full-time work. This is why grocery stores had not already hired full time drivers to deliver groceries, and why there is demand for Instacart. It's the same with Uber. During a rainy day rush-hour there are rarely any medallion cabs available, so Uber created a way to get transportation on those days (surge pricing) that incentiveizes drivers to work during those times. So normal (expected) peaks and troughs in utilization result in a price signal that reflects demand on a much more granular time scale than simply a full time or part time worker with a schedule planned months in advance. There are two ways to solve this, and Instacart and Uber are both following the approach that is more economically sound -- pass the actual price signals to would-be workers, so that they can self-select in an optimizing way. Nearly ever Uber driver I talk to is very pleased to be able to make the money on his/her terms, even if it's not great money, or if it's not as good as it used to be. If we create an old-fashioned, industrial-era labor market overlay for the gig economy, all we'll accomplish is taking away some good employment options for those who need them most. All of the "perks" of the industrial-era labor movement are geared at a specific labor/employer dynamic. Uber and Instacart are shifting that dynamic and doing the work of matching supply and demand to make work available that was not available before. We must adjust our view of what a "good" and "fair" job is, when we consider that without the matching mechanism these jobs would not exist. Let's not kill them off just because someone exploited a loophole about ordering massive size cases of water. Ultimately I think the ideal version of "uber for everything" is a worker-owned cooperative, but until VC gets tired of helping to prove out the model, such cooperatives are at a disadvantage. That is a temporary disadvantage. Let's not hamstring the cooperatives before they can even launch!
- thrownblown 9y ago
  One of the lessons of Austin's temporary Uber/Lyft kick out was that very quickly worker run ride sharing emerged to serve the need.
  - largehotcoffee 9y ago
    Except Uber/Lyft are back in Austin, and that worker run ride share didn't work.
notaboutdave 9y ago
Is this corporate greed or is the value of unskilled labor quickly approaching zero?
- sulam 9y ago
  I think the value of unskilled, marginal time spent is effectively zero at times where the utilization is approaching zero. What I think this demonstrates is that the issue is very uneven demand. An analogy might be the electric company, which at some points of the day is literally seeing net negative demand in areas with enough renewable generation. They have power plants that can run any time, though, whereas gig workers cannot always pick and choose when they work.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- fullshark 9y ago
  The latter. They are apparently able to find people to work for them at these wages.
- sitkack 9y ago
  The goal of the corporation is to have systems so easy to use that all labor can be unskilled. It depowers the workforce as literally ever laborer is fungible.
- jabretti 9y ago
  In the US, the price of unskilled labour has been deliberately driven down by decades of non-enforcement of immigration laws. Even a year after the election of a President who was supposed to deal with this issue there's been very little action. In Australia we have control of our borders and the price of unskilled labour is more respectable.
  - sulam 9y ago
    Orly? NYT: Workers Lured to Australia Find Low Pay and Tough Conditions https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/20/world/australia/temporary-work-visas-wages.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/20/world/australia/temporary...
drtillberg 9y ago
This isn't innovation, it is exploitation. Where are the state attorneys' general on this? Injured hauling a 600-lb order of sugar and cooking oil -- it's absurd the company does not carry workers' comp insurance for this. In the real world not carrying workers' comp insurance is very serious business. This is going to go like Napster, we'll find a better way when it is gone.
- jabretti 9y ago
  But they can opt out of any order they don't want to fulfill, right? Who would choose to fulfill that crazy order for the price on offer?
  - Spivak 9y ago
    It might just be my opinion bit I think that the individual right to refuse is never enough protection. Especially in employment where preying on people who can't afford to say no seems to be the norm.
pw 9y ago
The stories about large Bay-area tech companies placing enormous orders through Instacart are pretty appalling.
- hocuspocus 9y ago
  Ironically enough this wouldn't be an issue almost anywhere outside the US, where online groceries shopping was solved by the supermarkets themselves in the early 2000s. Despite employee benefits, minimum wages, collective bargaining and all that.
  - GFischer 9y ago
    Well, at least in my country, their websites suck, and you can't guarantee delivery other than "sometime in the afternoon", meaning if you're on a tight schedule you're stuck.
username223 9y ago
> Some shoppers have taken to individually showing their customers how to remove the fee ("Do you want to know how to save 10 percent?") and pay their shopper directly via tip instead. This -- just remove the parasites. If you, as an insta-serf, can tell your customer that "the retail price is $X, you're being charged $Y, and I'm being paid $Z," you can become a true "independent contractor" by cutting InstaSerf, Inc. out of the equation. If the difference is greater than zero, split it.
aphextron 9y ago
Instacart pay depends entirely on where you work. My brother works for them in SF/SV and earns around $2k/week with wages and tips. For someone with zero skills or job training otherwise it's a pretty sweet deal. Plus you end up with a car load of free groceries to take home whenever the system screws up an order.
- chrisgd 9y ago
  $96k a year delivering on Instacart?
  - reducesuffering 9y ago
    2k / week * 52 weeks = 104k
    - busterarm 9y ago
      Tough to live on in SF. Wow, I'm really saying that.
      - ribosometronome 9y ago
        Tough to raise a family on in SF -- it's an absurdly livable wage if you're willing to rent a room.
      - tehlike 9y ago
        Presumably, you can live down south or in east bay.
    - chrisgd 9y ago
      Thanks, was thinking there might be some vacation, days they don't work.
- camus2 9y ago
  > Instacart pay depends entirely on where you work. My brother works for them in SF/SV and earns around $2k/week with wages and tips. For someone with zero skills or job training otherwise it's a pretty sweet deal. Plus you end up with a car load of free groceries to take home whenever the system screws up an order. Funny how we were hearing these stories about Uber as well a few years ago, where people online were pretending some drivers became millionaire working for Uber. We now know none of this was true.
couchand 9y ago
> Instacart has agreed to pay at least several million dollars to settle the lawsuits, which will result in a typical settlement payout of a few hundred dollars per worker. The attorneys who brought the lawsuits, by contrast, stand to make millions. This seems like an unnecessary and out-of-context dig at lawyers. Also, the citation provided doesn't square with the claim: the settlement they linked to allowed total damages of $2 million, and capped the attorney's fees at 25%, so the maximum payout is half a million.
- Spivak 9y ago
  I get the sentiment that there are some lawsuits where the only people making real money are the lawyers but I think it's weird that it reflects on the them and not the system that pays out so little to injured classes. For a case like this it's easy to rack up a million dollars in billable hours.
jackvalentine 9y ago
The obvious 'fair' thing for instacart would be something along the lines of paying per item with weight taken in to account. Every packaged item has a barcode that you can look up to see the weight. ...but of course, that would make the commercial delivery services viable competitors to instacart on big orders right? Can't have that.
mpg515 9y ago
If you do use Instacart, you should definitely opt-out of the "service fee" at checkout and put that money towards the tip directly for your shopper.
thisisit 9y ago
> Ars spoke with six Instacart shoppers who said that they have routinely been made to pick up several heavy items, such as cases of bottled water, soda, or ice. In Bangalore, I routinely see people from not only grocery delivery companies, Big Basket but food delivery like Freshmenu carrying huge carry bags with god knows how many items. Couple of times I have seen people struggle to get up the stairs with that much weight on their backs. And those are not contractors but employees. I am sure few years later, we will need a study of back or some orthopedic problems associated with "shoppers".
Xunxi 9y ago
Of all the delivery services out there Amazon Restaurants/ Food Delivery is the only one that pays right. There's a fixed hourly rate of about $16 that you receive whether you make a delivery or not. Any tip that you receive if you make a delivery at some point in time gets added. All the rest give you a pittance, some even based on mileage. Its a pity!
tbiwiti 9y ago
I've said this before, but I think a key component of contractors' rights going forward will be legislating their employers' ability to "lock them in" with loyalty programs and the like. In this case, a large part of the issue seems to be certain orders from people (and companies) that have found loopholes in the pricing (bulk orders of large, heavy goods). If contractors could decline these orders with no repercussions, they wouldn't be nearly as much of an issue. Instacart would fail to deliver these orders and quickly learn they need to change their pricing structure. The argument could be made that you can go too far in giving contractors the right to decline. I can imagine various forms of extortion occurring or problems being unable to blacklist problematic contractors, but it's a tradeoff that seems to be too far in the company's favour right now. Maybe disincentiving contract work in service-critical environments is a good thing, considering the complaints about rising part time and contracted work and not enough full time work.

132 points by gscott 9y ago

COMPOSITE HACKS • If Truly you Are In Need Of A PROFESSIONAL HACKER Who Will Get Your Job Done Efficiently With Swift Response, You Have Met the Right Person. MOTIVE: • I don't care how technical the target is, The reason why I am hired is to simply get the job done however, I engage in"silent" attacks so the target remains unaware of the hack. MY HACKING CAPABILITIES: There are series of people who needs to Hack their target email I.D, social media websites,apps or smartphones, for many reasons such as husband cheating on wife, girlfriend cheating on boyfriend or vice versa. Or important information needed to be dumped/sniffed from the target email address, website, a particular location, or for whatsoever reason you want to hire a Hacker Or As a parent you might need to monitor what your children are doing on social media and on their personal computers so that they don’t get into trouble. Or if you want to hack a private domain email account(business email), or you want to eraze your name from court’s criminal records, perhaps you might want to Hack into the database of any government agency, All these are what I can get done within few hours. Frankly speaking, I always give a 100% guarantee on any job I am been asked to do, because I have always been successful in Almost all my jobs for the past 10years and my clients can testify to that . To hack anything needs time though, but I can provide a swift response to your job depending on how fast and urgent you need. Time also depends on what exactly you want to hack and how serious you are. Enough time with social engineering is required for hacking. So if you want to bind me in a short time, then just don't contact me because I can't hack within one hour,sorry. Basically, time depends on your luck. If its good luck, then it is possible to hack within one hour but, if its in the other way round, it would take few hours. I have seen FAKE HACKERS claiming they can hack in 1hr , but there is no REAL HACKER who can say this (AVOID THEM). If your target account is Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, sexual accounts or other social accounts, Bitcoin wallets, etc, or you want to hack into someones smartphone so you can monitor their calls, read their messages, chats, and social account activities without their notice, Or you wana track someone’s location, Or you want to retrieve lost files,messages, feel free to contact me, we would have a nice deal! I will explain to you how I am going to get the job done. You can also contact me for other Cyber Attacks And Hijackings, i do almost All Any binary options scam victims that is eager to recover lost money can also reach out to me, I'm Always ready to Help. compositehacks@gmail.com

PhantomGremlin 9y ago

Back in the old days, when we actually manufactured clothing in this country, there was this concept of "piece work". You weren't paid by the hour, but instead by your work output. E.g. if you were performing some sewing step on a blouse, such as adding buttons, you might be paid $0.25 per blouse for that work step. Of course employers tried to cheat, by setting the per-piece rate very low. You had to process many pieces to get a reasonable wage. The Federal government was forced to step in. They required monitoring of all this activity so that "all employees, including piece work employees, earn at least the minimum wage."[1] If only the people running the sweatshops in the old days thought to call their people "contractors" instead of "employees". They could have avoided most of the pesky regulation. I'm being sarcastic. Clearly those people were employees under any reasonable definition. Same should apply here. This whole gig economy crap has gotten totally out of hand. Fundamentally, an Instacart worker only has flexibility of when to work. The rest is more-or-less predetermined. Should that person be a contractor instead of an employee because he has his choice of the order in which to traverse the supermarket aisles? Should that person be a contractor because he has his choice of which streets to drive on from store to destination? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piece_work#Minimum_wage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piece_work#Minimum_wage

themagician 9y ago
It’s precisely BECAUSE the law hasn’t caught up that most of these exist the way that they do at all. Instacart, Postmates, Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, etc. all make profit on the gap between what they pay and what the regulated equivalent pays. Their big competitive advantage is just lower costs by completely ignoring the law. We talk about “innovation” but then these services mostly operate on not paying employees, insurance, benefits, licensing, etc. If I stop paying taxes and declare my consultancy a religion does that make my innovative? I’m instantly 40% more profitable than the next guy. You can “donate” via a mobile app too! It’s not a payment, it’s a donation. Please note the donation must be as it states on the invoic... err, donation services document.
- rileymat2 9y ago
  With respect to Uber, the user experience is far better than a taxi cab. I would pay taxi cab prices for its level of service.

TaylorAlexander 9y ago

I recently ordered from DoorDash, a similar service. The app gave me a price for the order and then had a line item called “Dasher Tip” and asked me how much I wanted to put down. I put in $20. Later when the woman arrived with the food, we stopped to talk for a minute. She was a little younger than my mom, and said she had just started working for the service after her husband died. She asked me if she could ask me an awkward question, but I said okay. She wanted to know how much I had tipped her. $20. She showed me her phone with the app on our order. DoorDash told her we had tipped her $6, which she thought was suspiciously low (we ordered $90 in food). TL;DR: DoorDash presented me with an optional field called “Dasher Tip”, which I wasn’t sure of but assumed this was the Tip for the woman bringing us the food. I paid $20 for this “tip” but only $6 made it to the woman (whose husband had died). Incidentally I offered her a cash tip but she refused - she said I had already paid it and it should come from DoorDash. Last night my friends wanted to order food again. I called it in to the restaurant and we picked it up. I don’t want to use DoorDash anymore.

cylinder 9y ago
The psychopaths are running the show now. I don't use any of these nonsense delivery apps.
- dzonga 9y ago
  VC money can't make up for their weak numbers and incompetence. They gotta push up revenue in other ways.
  - narrator 9y ago
    The delivery business is wildly unprofitable and just runs on VC money. As soon as this economic cycle is all over they'll probably all be out of business.
    - jjeaff 9y ago
      Ya, there is this ridiculous notion that, like Uber, you can just subsidize until they've run everyone else out of the market. But in reality, if Uber or door dash or whoever take over their respective markets and then back up prices, people will stop using them just as quickly as they started and smaller, cheaper competitors will pop right back up. You don't exactly need a multi-million dollar war chest to start delivering food.

spo81rty 9y ago

What I don't understand is if the pay or working conditions are so bad, why don't people just go find a new job? If they can't get anyone to do the job, they will be forced to pay more or fix the conditions. If they have a terrible reputation, nobody will want to work for them. It's simple supply and demand.

grandalf 9y ago
Maybe the average pay is $15/hour. We are not given enough data to estimate whether striking is rational.
tabeth 9y ago
It boggles me that anyone believes this. It's called leverage. Not everyone has equal ability, nor equal ability to change jobs for a variety of reasons.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- conanbatt 9y ago
  So what do you think happens to those people if by a requirment on minimum income by instacart, they are barred from that job opportunity.
davidcbc 9y ago
Because finding a low skill job is pretty hard. Not everyone has the luxury of choice.
- fpisfun 9y ago
  I've never seen this to be the case that finding a low skill job is hard. In my area tons of people refuse to work but all kinds of places are constantly hiring like restaurants, etc. Many may require passing a drug screen though which it seems most people aren't able to do.

grandalf 9y ago

The gig economy is always going to be more volatile than full-time work. This is why grocery stores had not already hired full time drivers to deliver groceries, and why there is demand for Instacart. It's the same with Uber. During a rainy day rush-hour there are rarely any medallion cabs available, so Uber created a way to get transportation on those days (surge pricing) that incentiveizes drivers to work during those times. So normal (expected) peaks and troughs in utilization result in a price signal that reflects demand on a much more granular time scale than simply a full time or part time worker with a schedule planned months in advance. There are two ways to solve this, and Instacart and Uber are both following the approach that is more economically sound -- pass the actual price signals to would-be workers, so that they can self-select in an optimizing way. Nearly ever Uber driver I talk to is very pleased to be able to make the money on his/her terms, even if it's not great money, or if it's not as good as it used to be. If we create an old-fashioned, industrial-era labor market overlay for the gig economy, all we'll accomplish is taking away some good employment options for those who need them most. All of the "perks" of the industrial-era labor movement are geared at a specific labor/employer dynamic. Uber and Instacart are shifting that dynamic and doing the work of matching supply and demand to make work available that was not available before. We must adjust our view of what a "good" and "fair" job is, when we consider that without the matching mechanism these jobs would not exist. Let's not kill them off just because someone exploited a loophole about ordering massive size cases of water. Ultimately I think the ideal version of "uber for everything" is a worker-owned cooperative, but until VC gets tired of helping to prove out the model, such cooperatives are at a disadvantage. That is a temporary disadvantage. Let's not hamstring the cooperatives before they can even launch!

thrownblown 9y ago
One of the lessons of Austin's temporary Uber/Lyft kick out was that very quickly worker run ride sharing emerged to serve the need.
- largehotcoffee 9y ago
  Except Uber/Lyft are back in Austin, and that worker run ride share didn't work.

notaboutdave 9y ago

Is this corporate greed or is the value of unskilled labor quickly approaching zero?

sulam 9y ago
I think the value of unskilled, marginal time spent is effectively zero at times where the utilization is approaching zero. What I think this demonstrates is that the issue is very uneven demand. An analogy might be the electric company, which at some points of the day is literally seeing net negative demand in areas with enough renewable generation. They have power plants that can run any time, though, whereas gig workers cannot always pick and choose when they work.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
fullshark 9y ago
The latter. They are apparently able to find people to work for them at these wages.
sitkack 9y ago
The goal of the corporation is to have systems so easy to use that all labor can be unskilled. It depowers the workforce as literally ever laborer is fungible.
jabretti 9y ago
In the US, the price of unskilled labour has been deliberately driven down by decades of non-enforcement of immigration laws. Even a year after the election of a President who was supposed to deal with this issue there's been very little action. In Australia we have control of our borders and the price of unskilled labour is more respectable.
- sulam 9y ago
  Orly? NYT: Workers Lured to Australia Find Low Pay and Tough Conditions https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/20/world/australia/temporary-work-visas-wages.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/20/world/australia/temporary...

drtillberg 9y ago

This isn't innovation, it is exploitation. Where are the state attorneys' general on this? Injured hauling a 600-lb order of sugar and cooking oil -- it's absurd the company does not carry workers' comp insurance for this. In the real world not carrying workers' comp insurance is very serious business. This is going to go like Napster, we'll find a better way when it is gone.

jabretti 9y ago
But they can opt out of any order they don't want to fulfill, right? Who would choose to fulfill that crazy order for the price on offer?
- Spivak 9y ago
  It might just be my opinion bit I think that the individual right to refuse is never enough protection. Especially in employment where preying on people who can't afford to say no seems to be the norm.

pw 9y ago

The stories about large Bay-area tech companies placing enormous orders through Instacart are pretty appalling.

hocuspocus 9y ago
Ironically enough this wouldn't be an issue almost anywhere outside the US, where online groceries shopping was solved by the supermarkets themselves in the early 2000s. Despite employee benefits, minimum wages, collective bargaining and all that.
- GFischer 9y ago
  Well, at least in my country, their websites suck, and you can't guarantee delivery other than "sometime in the afternoon", meaning if you're on a tight schedule you're stuck.

username223 9y ago

> Some shoppers have taken to individually showing their customers how to remove the fee ("Do you want to know how to save 10 percent?") and pay their shopper directly via tip instead. This -- just remove the parasites. If you, as an insta-serf, can tell your customer that "the retail price is $X, you're being charged $Y, and I'm being paid $Z," you can become a true "independent contractor" by cutting InstaSerf, Inc. out of the equation. If the difference is greater than zero, split it.

aphextron 9y ago

Instacart pay depends entirely on where you work. My brother works for them in SF/SV and earns around $2k/week with wages and tips. For someone with zero skills or job training otherwise it's a pretty sweet deal. Plus you end up with a car load of free groceries to take home whenever the system screws up an order.

chrisgd 9y ago
$96k a year delivering on Instacart?
- reducesuffering 9y ago
  2k / week * 52 weeks = 104k
  - busterarm 9y ago
    Tough to live on in SF. Wow, I'm really saying that.
    - ribosometronome 9y ago
      Tough to raise a family on in SF -- it's an absurdly livable wage if you're willing to rent a room.
    - tehlike 9y ago
      Presumably, you can live down south or in east bay.
  - chrisgd 9y ago
    Thanks, was thinking there might be some vacation, days they don't work.
camus2 9y ago
> Instacart pay depends entirely on where you work. My brother works for them in SF/SV and earns around $2k/week with wages and tips. For someone with zero skills or job training otherwise it's a pretty sweet deal. Plus you end up with a car load of free groceries to take home whenever the system screws up an order. Funny how we were hearing these stories about Uber as well a few years ago, where people online were pretending some drivers became millionaire working for Uber. We now know none of this was true.

couchand 9y ago

> Instacart has agreed to pay at least several million dollars to settle the lawsuits, which will result in a typical settlement payout of a few hundred dollars per worker. The attorneys who brought the lawsuits, by contrast, stand to make millions. This seems like an unnecessary and out-of-context dig at lawyers. Also, the citation provided doesn't square with the claim: the settlement they linked to allowed total damages of $2 million, and capped the attorney's fees at 25%, so the maximum payout is half a million.

Spivak 9y ago
I get the sentiment that there are some lawsuits where the only people making real money are the lawyers but I think it's weird that it reflects on the them and not the system that pays out so little to injured classes. For a case like this it's easy to rack up a million dollars in billable hours.

jackvalentine 9y ago

The obvious 'fair' thing for instacart would be something along the lines of paying per item with weight taken in to account. Every packaged item has a barcode that you can look up to see the weight. ...but of course, that would make the commercial delivery services viable competitors to instacart on big orders right? Can't have that.

mpg515 9y ago

If you do use Instacart, you should definitely opt-out of the "service fee" at checkout and put that money towards the tip directly for your shopper.

thisisit 9y ago

> Ars spoke with six Instacart shoppers who said that they have routinely been made to pick up several heavy items, such as cases of bottled water, soda, or ice. In Bangalore, I routinely see people from not only grocery delivery companies, Big Basket but food delivery like Freshmenu carrying huge carry bags with god knows how many items. Couple of times I have seen people struggle to get up the stairs with that much weight on their backs. And those are not contractors but employees. I am sure few years later, we will need a study of back or some orthopedic problems associated with "shoppers".

Xunxi 9y ago

Of all the delivery services out there Amazon Restaurants/ Food Delivery is the only one that pays right. There's a fixed hourly rate of about $16 that you receive whether you make a delivery or not. Any tip that you receive if you make a delivery at some point in time gets added. All the rest give you a pittance, some even based on mileage. Its a pity!

tbiwiti 9y ago

I've said this before, but I think a key component of contractors' rights going forward will be legislating their employers' ability to "lock them in" with loyalty programs and the like. In this case, a large part of the issue seems to be certain orders from people (and companies) that have found loopholes in the pricing (bulk orders of large, heavy goods). If contractors could decline these orders with no repercussions, they wouldn't be nearly as much of an issue. Instacart would fail to deliver these orders and quickly learn they need to change their pricing structure. The argument could be made that you can go too far in giving contractors the right to decline. I can imagine various forms of extortion occurring or problems being unable to blacklist problematic contractors, but it's a tradeoff that seems to be too far in the company's favour right now. Maybe disincentiving contract work in service-critical environments is a good thing, considering the complaints about rising part time and contracted work and not enough full time work.