8 ms·

I have had so many bad experiences with instacart: * shopper buying yams rather than potatoes (note: this was not a replacement, they seemed to genuinely belie

I have had so many bad experiences with instacart: * shopper buying yams rather than potatoes (note: this was not a replacement, they seemed to genuinely believe they had bought potatoes.) * shopper going to checkout before I can suggest a better replacement for an item. * shopper buys obviously moldy fruit. * shopper buys five roaster chickens as a replacement for five cornish hens. * shopper gives up really easily on trivial things like a common chip brand. It’s frustrating because I can both understand the shopper, but I then need to give instacart more money to actually get the food I’ve verified by phone they have in stock. Furthermore, about 80% of these omissions are most easily fixable if I just drive to the store and buy it. So yea, I just do my own shopping again so I don’t spend $30 on delivery fees and tips and end up spending $5 on furry strawberries. I don’t understand why instacart can’t work with the store to pack the inventory by people who know where shit is, can identify products, and can inquire about inventory. Other delivery services do just fine with a two-legged approach.

zitterbewegung 6y ago
I've ordered items from Starbucks and when I walk in to get the order they state that the item is not in stock. The ability for grocers to know exactly what is in stock and what isn't in realtime isn't something they are designed to do and isn't a trivial ask.
- monadic2 6y ago
  Right, but they could pack the food and ask me to verify before delivering, same as at starbucks. In fact at starbucks I’m rather shocked this is an issue—you don’t have the weird issue of products being in someone’s cart while they appear in inventory, let alone blatant theft! You’d think they would be able to provide an accurate inventory in realtime. EDIT: also, to clarify, “by phone” in my previous post meant I called the store to ask if they have the item my shopper couldn’t find. They put me on hold to check the shelves.
  - vbezhenar 6y ago
    Another solution is to allow to made a purchase days before. I can plan my cart for a week and most of items are recurrent. So they know what they need and they can fill those orders in advance.
shawabawa3 6y ago
I find it hard to believe instacarts model is still the best way of doing online grocery shopping in America... In the UK there's Ocado that has their own warehouses and most of the selection and packing is automated. If there are replacements you're told in advance and can accept or reject the replacement Most of the main supermarket chains have followed suit and have similar services
- spaceisballer 6y ago
  There are other options, we have Peapod in my area. It’s the same stuff in grocery stores but from the warehouse. This pandemic has them overburdened and I can’t seem to find a delivery time. I tried Instacart once and the shopper was great but with so many things being out of stock I end up having to go out anyway. That plus the markup on all the items (the receipt was $20 less than what Instacart charged me, not including fees and delivery and tip).
  - monadic2 6y ago
    Agreed, I used peapod back in philly and it was worth every penny.
  - mattl 6y ago
    Peapod seems to never have certain common items, for example: Funyuns, diet Dr. Pepper...
    - wayoutthere 6y ago
      Maybe combine Peapod with GoPuff? They have never disappointed in the “I’m high as shit and just want some fucking Funyuns” segment of the market.
      - mattl 6y ago
        I'm trying to get sponsored by Funyuns, so I'd need to be eating them at work.
  - 6y ago
walshemj 6y ago
And also substituting generic brand for brand gives higher ROI
ed25519FUUU 6y ago
This reminds me of the price/quality matrix: * Using your own money to buy something for yourself: price and quality matter. * Using your own money to buy something for someone else. Price matters, not quality. * Using other people's money to buy something for other people. Neither price nor quality matter. It's one of the explanations for how we end up with so much waste with governments and organizations. They use other people's money to buy something for other people.
- harlanji 6y ago
  I’m a shopper at a grocery store and I do my best to shop like I’m shopping for myself. Am either fast or in my training grace period. I’m a terrible employee generally, too much care. I assume I’ll be fired and will do my best shopping until then. I did get the job randomly and had shopped there often prior, a clerk brought me to the hiring manager so it was easy to get hired. Of course each day it sinks in that it’s a business with managers and metrics. At least programming technical debt paid well, it seems clear that outside of boutique consulting it’s all about the numbers... good to know for sure.
blueblob 6y ago
Agreed. Shopper buys yellow cilantro with brown spots and bag is full of water. I plan a meal around protein and shopper gets everything except the protein. Shopper substitutes regular soda for diet soda. Everything at the store is not listed on the site.
y-c-o-m-b 6y ago
> shopper buys obviously moldy fruit. This happened with my last Costco purchase. I don't know how the produce was even out on the floor let alone being picked up by the delivery person who clearly didn't use their sense of vision (nor smell!). The previous time they picked some random substitution for something I explicitly marked as "do not substitute" due to allergies. I think I'm done using that service.
- notyourwork 6y ago
  > person who clearly didn't use their sense of vision (nor smell!) When people are paid by quantity not quality you don't take time to inspect or smell the merchandise. You grab what checks the box and move on. Its a numbers game not a quality game and the quality is deferred to the store supply instead of the shopper. Why is anyone surprised by this? Its the same reason an Uber driver may drive recklessly to pickup more fares. Your safety isn't their concern.
davidw 6y ago
We've had an ok experience with instacart. I've tried to think of it sort of like ... when you stop at a little store in a small town before going camping, and there's not a great selection and it's kind of expensive. But you are happy to get some of the things you need, and it's ok if it's not perfect, because we're in the middle of a disaster of epic proportions. That said, I'm really looking forward to doing my own shopping too. Sometimes stuff comes to mind that I didn't think of to put on my list, or I have an idea for a meal, looking at other things.
- irrational 6y ago
  Off-topic, but do you really view that "we're in the middle of a disaster of epic proportions"? I can think of a huge number of actual disasters of epic proportions (full-scale nuclear war, 100 kilometer asteroid impact, yellowstone super caldera explodes, an actual pandemic that has 99% effective death rate arises, etc.) The current situation seems pretty low-key compared to a real disaster.
  - op00to 6y ago
    The hundred thousand people dead and millions out of work in the US alone would like to have a word with you about your denial that the COVID-19 pandemic is not of epic proportions.
    - irrational 6y ago
      I'd be happy to speak with them. It is a sad state of affairs, but in my book, a disaster of epic proportions is a large percent of the world population dying. It is a disaster of such proportions that entire nations collapse. It is a economic depression that lasts for generations. What we are going through right now is like a hangnail compared to your entire foot being ripped off. It is scary for the people most affected, but hardly a disaster of epic proportions.
      - colejohnson66 6y ago
        I’m curious what you would call this situation then?
vmception 6y ago
yeah but the joy of getting fresh baguettes delivered instead of merely getting left over sustenance in an after thought after a long day at work another perspective
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
siruncledrew 6y ago
Interacting with instacart sums up the expression: ”if you want something done right, do it yourself”. At least for me, having to go a store is not a big deal, it’s just overcoming “inertia to leave home”. I would much rather: order directly from the store, have the store pack everything up, express pick it up from the store, and have a confirmation expected=actual for the order. The abstraction to having a third-party like instacart do all the - for lack of a better word - “order management” just seems to create an extra layer of bullshit to deal with. Going to the store, picking everything normally, and going through checkout myself, while not as convenient, has still consistently yielded the best results - so there is still a lot of catching up to do for store/third-party services to reach that level of performance(?).
- xur17 6y ago
  > I would much rather: order directly from the store, have the store pack everything up, express pick it up from the store, and have a confirmation expected=actual for the order. My store (Kroger) does exactly this, and I've been very pleased with the service once they worked out the kinks in the first few weeks of quarantine.
  - staplers 6y ago
    Having worked for Kroger satellite offices, this is funny because they announced a "partnership" with Instacart while I was there. You'd imagine there would be a lot of shared labor, but most of their business decisions were only ever implemented at C-level while managers were clueless as to what was actually being integrated.
- wozniacki 6y ago
  Some places make you dread going to grocery stores. Even club stores that require membership are bad. The experience has been nothing short of a nightmare off late, even prior to these pandemic times. Costco & Whole Food stores have especially declined in overall shopper experience. Clueless store staff, shoddy inventory levels, incompetent employees who cant be bothered to educate themselves on elementary details, rude and crass shoppers, shoppers who dont return their carts to the corrals, thinning variety of offerings, long lines at checkout, lack of adequate number of self checkout terminals .... the list goes on. I recall even 3-4 years things weren't so bad at these two very different stores. Now they're almost uniformly bad. I just wish they had large refrigerated silos outside the store in the parking lot, where they could let you pick up your online orders like Walmart does.
julianozen 6y ago
I think the big thing to remember is that Instacart offers a no lift in model for grocery stores to compete against Amazon/Walmart without doing anything to improve aging system. These companies do not have the expertise to become full distribution centers build a website that their customers will enjoy using. They are in bed with Instacart out of fear
mcv 6y ago
Sounds like instacart is independent from the shop it delivers from, and collects your groceries by hand. Is that correct? It sounds very inefficient to me. In Netherland, the largest supermarket chains all deliver to your home. (Used to be to your kitchen, but Corona changed that.) We've had our groceries delivered by Albert Heijn for about a decade now, and it's generally pretty good. You pay about EUR 5-10 for delivery depending on the time of day you want it. Two issues: when they don't have an item, you just don't get it. I'd prefer to get an alert a day in advance so I can select a replacement item, but that's apparently not an option for whatever reason. The other is of course perishables. Usually it's fine. Sometimes the bananas are a bit greener than I'd like, sometimes they're a bit yellower than my son likes (he likes them green for some reason). Sometimes the use-by date is in two days when we were planning to use it in 3 days. Never got anything moldy, though if something's moldy, broken or otherwise wrong, you get a discount on the next purchase, no questions asked. Not having to lug groceries around is great. Sometimes we still need to go to the supermarket to get one or two items, but that's no big deal.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
Vadoff 6y ago
Yeah, if the experience was an automated warehouse in which you know you're getting exactly what you want (and if it's not listed, it means they don't have it), it would be a lot better. The whole checkout experience can be automated, and the final items only need to be picked up and delivered.
Androider 6y ago
Amazon's Whole Foods delivery in my area is now direct from warehouse to home instead of in-store picking. It's so, so much better than Instacart. On my last large order of almost a hundred items, not a single replacement, I got exactly what I ordered the same day. Instacart is such a sub-standard experience, it's just fundamentally the wrong approach and we wouldn't accept it for any other type of online purchase.
- krustyburger 6y ago
  They’re still in-store picking. It’s just that Whole Foods/Prime Now has dedicated employees for this.
  - Androider 6y ago
    It's brand new as of April, it's definitely coming from a warehouse in an area where there is no Whole Foods store (I can track the path of the delivery van in the app). It's also not someone delivering with their own truck as before, but a blue-gray Amazon van, and the availability of items is spot on which was never the case even pre-covid.
    - krustyburger 6y ago
      Interesting. And you’re ordering from Whole Foods in the app and not just selecting Whole Foods items from the Amazon option? I know there are many Whole Foods items available on the Amazon section now.
- sarah2079 6y ago
  I have had the same experience with ordering Whole Foods and Amazon Fresh in the bay area. Everything I order arrives. I tried using a different grocery delivery and about 30% of what I ordered was out of stock. This was especially frustrating because delivery slots were in short supply here, so I felt rude making another small order immediately to fill in missing items. With WF/AF I at least know what is out of stock when making my order so I can choose my own substitutions or not bother trying to get ingredients for a recipe if something critical is missing.
clivestaples 6y ago
I've had almost the opposite experience. I got one questionable bag of onions. Otherwise, after five or six orders, I could not be happier.
iamthepieman 6y ago
Our local 3 store grocer offers shopping for 5$. You have to pick it up at the store but you don't have to go inside. They've been doing it for about a year. Never had a problem with it and their online interface is perfectly matched with their inventory. They text their replacements which you can reject before pickup.
tehwebguy 6y ago
Whole Foods / Amazon Fresh deliveries are like a thousand times better for me in west LA and come at very low cost. The chain of quality control is going to be a big reason that this moves back in-house IMO.
jedberg 6y ago
I'm the designated shopper in my family, since my wife has higher risk factors for COVID-19. Usually when we go shopping, I push the cart and pick the obvious items, but leave most of the picking to her because she's very specific in what she wants. But now I have to do it. I totally sympathize with the Instacart shoppers. Even with direct access to my wife via text including pictures, it's still hard to find exactly what she wants, and it takes a long time and a few passes through the store. They're not getting paid enough to care or do it right. Instacart needs to pay their pickers a lot more if they want it done right, but then of course they don't have a viable business model anymore.
- jonny_eh 6y ago
  Ha, same. I'll resort to facetime to figure out what that one thing she wants is.
  - bradknowles 6y ago
    I hated, loathed, and despised doing the shopping for my wife at Whole Foods. It’s not the store that’s the problem, it’s that she wants to graze the entire bloody flipping hot bar, and she insists I get a bunch of stuff they don’t actually have in stock, or where they ran out of stock hours ago. She can shop for herself online, either via Whole Foods Market on Amazon, or Instacart. Either way, I’m done.
peterwwillis 6y ago
I like ordering groceries online, but I think the idea of instant grocery shopping is flawed. 1) You're depending on & supporting an oppressed segment of the labor force (people who need multiple jobs to make ends meet, because no 'gig economy' startup pays a living wage), 2) You're fighting with "surges" of use and paying wildly varying prices, with wildly varying levels of service, 3) You don't even get the items you're looking for half the time (in my experience), 4) It's more expensive!, 5) you don't actually need groceries delivered to you instantly. Since COVID-19 I have switched to buying from local businesses and getting food from Co-ops and farm shares (and growing my own). I can schedule regular deliveries of produce to my door in bulk (in reusable containers), which not only reduces waste, it actually helps me plan my week/month better, I still get all the things I wanted, the price is fair, and I'm helping local farms and businesses. I'm pretty sure the reason most people don't do this is that they're lazy, selfish, greedy and entitled. My evidence is the last two weekends I've ventured out into the world to look at apartments to rent, with the occasional jaunt to a hiking trail. I found virtually nobody was wearing a mask or socially distancing, unless they were forced to by a greeter in front of a business like a grocery store (many customers were trying to walk in without a mask, and thankfully were rebuffed). Many probably could have ordered online the same way I did, but would rather the immediacy of 'do it yourself' - even during a pandemic. Sadly it's the poorest and most vulnerable people that need grocery delivery the most, because they have the hardest time getting to a store. A poor person in a food desert may need to spend over two hours round trip on transportation in order to get food, and an elderly person may just not be mobile enough. I doubt we would ever fund a public delivery service for them (though in theory the postal service could).
mikecoles 6y ago
My first, and last, instacart experience had the shopper cancel all of the items in my order and then charge me a service fee. She said the store closed before she could do the shopping. The store was already closed when she selected my order to pick up. Setting the tip amount before the service is rendered is a horrible idea as well. Shop local at independent stores. The service and knowledge of the workers is worth it.
badwolf 6y ago
As someone without a car, I really want to like various grocery delivery services... Unfortunately every single time I've ordered groceries has been a less than stellar experience. Even Amazon Fresh.

zitterbewegung 6y ago

I've ordered items from Starbucks and when I walk in to get the order they state that the item is not in stock. The ability for grocers to know exactly what is in stock and what isn't in realtime isn't something they are designed to do and isn't a trivial ask.

monadic2 6y ago
Right, but they could pack the food and ask me to verify before delivering, same as at starbucks. In fact at starbucks I’m rather shocked this is an issue—you don’t have the weird issue of products being in someone’s cart while they appear in inventory, let alone blatant theft! You’d think they would be able to provide an accurate inventory in realtime. EDIT: also, to clarify, “by phone” in my previous post meant I called the store to ask if they have the item my shopper couldn’t find. They put me on hold to check the shelves.
- vbezhenar 6y ago
  Another solution is to allow to made a purchase days before. I can plan my cart for a week and most of items are recurrent. So they know what they need and they can fill those orders in advance.

shawabawa3 6y ago

I find it hard to believe instacarts model is still the best way of doing online grocery shopping in America... In the UK there's Ocado that has their own warehouses and most of the selection and packing is automated. If there are replacements you're told in advance and can accept or reject the replacement Most of the main supermarket chains have followed suit and have similar services

spaceisballer 6y ago
There are other options, we have Peapod in my area. It’s the same stuff in grocery stores but from the warehouse. This pandemic has them overburdened and I can’t seem to find a delivery time. I tried Instacart once and the shopper was great but with so many things being out of stock I end up having to go out anyway. That plus the markup on all the items (the receipt was $20 less than what Instacart charged me, not including fees and delivery and tip).
- monadic2 6y ago
  Agreed, I used peapod back in philly and it was worth every penny.
- mattl 6y ago
  Peapod seems to never have certain common items, for example: Funyuns, diet Dr. Pepper...
  - wayoutthere 6y ago
    Maybe combine Peapod with GoPuff? They have never disappointed in the “I’m high as shit and just want some fucking Funyuns” segment of the market.
    - mattl 6y ago
      I'm trying to get sponsored by Funyuns, so I'd need to be eating them at work.
- 6y ago

walshemj 6y ago

And also substituting generic brand for brand gives higher ROI

ed25519FUUU 6y ago

This reminds me of the price/quality matrix: * Using your own money to buy something for yourself: price and quality matter. * Using your own money to buy something for someone else. Price matters, not quality. * Using other people's money to buy something for other people. Neither price nor quality matter. It's one of the explanations for how we end up with so much waste with governments and organizations. They use other people's money to buy something for other people.

harlanji 6y ago
I’m a shopper at a grocery store and I do my best to shop like I’m shopping for myself. Am either fast or in my training grace period. I’m a terrible employee generally, too much care. I assume I’ll be fired and will do my best shopping until then. I did get the job randomly and had shopped there often prior, a clerk brought me to the hiring manager so it was easy to get hired. Of course each day it sinks in that it’s a business with managers and metrics. At least programming technical debt paid well, it seems clear that outside of boutique consulting it’s all about the numbers... good to know for sure.

blueblob 6y ago

Agreed. Shopper buys yellow cilantro with brown spots and bag is full of water. I plan a meal around protein and shopper gets everything except the protein. Shopper substitutes regular soda for diet soda. Everything at the store is not listed on the site.

y-c-o-m-b 6y ago

> shopper buys obviously moldy fruit. This happened with my last Costco purchase. I don't know how the produce was even out on the floor let alone being picked up by the delivery person who clearly didn't use their sense of vision (nor smell!). The previous time they picked some random substitution for something I explicitly marked as "do not substitute" due to allergies. I think I'm done using that service.

notyourwork 6y ago
> person who clearly didn't use their sense of vision (nor smell!) When people are paid by quantity not quality you don't take time to inspect or smell the merchandise. You grab what checks the box and move on. Its a numbers game not a quality game and the quality is deferred to the store supply instead of the shopper. Why is anyone surprised by this? Its the same reason an Uber driver may drive recklessly to pickup more fares. Your safety isn't their concern.

davidw 6y ago

We've had an ok experience with instacart. I've tried to think of it sort of like ... when you stop at a little store in a small town before going camping, and there's not a great selection and it's kind of expensive. But you are happy to get some of the things you need, and it's ok if it's not perfect, because we're in the middle of a disaster of epic proportions. That said, I'm really looking forward to doing my own shopping too. Sometimes stuff comes to mind that I didn't think of to put on my list, or I have an idea for a meal, looking at other things.

irrational 6y ago
Off-topic, but do you really view that "we're in the middle of a disaster of epic proportions"? I can think of a huge number of actual disasters of epic proportions (full-scale nuclear war, 100 kilometer asteroid impact, yellowstone super caldera explodes, an actual pandemic that has 99% effective death rate arises, etc.) The current situation seems pretty low-key compared to a real disaster.
- op00to 6y ago
  The hundred thousand people dead and millions out of work in the US alone would like to have a word with you about your denial that the COVID-19 pandemic is not of epic proportions.
  - irrational 6y ago
    I'd be happy to speak with them. It is a sad state of affairs, but in my book, a disaster of epic proportions is a large percent of the world population dying. It is a disaster of such proportions that entire nations collapse. It is a economic depression that lasts for generations. What we are going through right now is like a hangnail compared to your entire foot being ripped off. It is scary for the people most affected, but hardly a disaster of epic proportions.
    - colejohnson66 6y ago
      I’m curious what you would call this situation then?

vmception 6y ago

yeah but the joy of getting fresh baguettes delivered instead of merely getting left over sustenance in an after thought after a long day at work another perspective

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

siruncledrew 6y ago

Interacting with instacart sums up the expression: ”if you want something done right, do it yourself”. At least for me, having to go a store is not a big deal, it’s just overcoming “inertia to leave home”. I would much rather: order directly from the store, have the store pack everything up, express pick it up from the store, and have a confirmation expected=actual for the order. The abstraction to having a third-party like instacart do all the - for lack of a better word - “order management” just seems to create an extra layer of bullshit to deal with. Going to the store, picking everything normally, and going through checkout myself, while not as convenient, has still consistently yielded the best results - so there is still a lot of catching up to do for store/third-party services to reach that level of performance(?).

xur17 6y ago
> I would much rather: order directly from the store, have the store pack everything up, express pick it up from the store, and have a confirmation expected=actual for the order. My store (Kroger) does exactly this, and I've been very pleased with the service once they worked out the kinks in the first few weeks of quarantine.
- staplers 6y ago
  Having worked for Kroger satellite offices, this is funny because they announced a "partnership" with Instacart while I was there. You'd imagine there would be a lot of shared labor, but most of their business decisions were only ever implemented at C-level while managers were clueless as to what was actually being integrated.
wozniacki 6y ago
Some places make you dread going to grocery stores. Even club stores that require membership are bad. The experience has been nothing short of a nightmare off late, even prior to these pandemic times. Costco & Whole Food stores have especially declined in overall shopper experience. Clueless store staff, shoddy inventory levels, incompetent employees who cant be bothered to educate themselves on elementary details, rude and crass shoppers, shoppers who dont return their carts to the corrals, thinning variety of offerings, long lines at checkout, lack of adequate number of self checkout terminals .... the list goes on. I recall even 3-4 years things weren't so bad at these two very different stores. Now they're almost uniformly bad. I just wish they had large refrigerated silos outside the store in the parking lot, where they could let you pick up your online orders like Walmart does.

julianozen 6y ago

I think the big thing to remember is that Instacart offers a no lift in model for grocery stores to compete against Amazon/Walmart without doing anything to improve aging system. These companies do not have the expertise to become full distribution centers build a website that their customers will enjoy using. They are in bed with Instacart out of fear

mcv 6y ago

Sounds like instacart is independent from the shop it delivers from, and collects your groceries by hand. Is that correct? It sounds very inefficient to me. In Netherland, the largest supermarket chains all deliver to your home. (Used to be to your kitchen, but Corona changed that.) We've had our groceries delivered by Albert Heijn for about a decade now, and it's generally pretty good. You pay about EUR 5-10 for delivery depending on the time of day you want it. Two issues: when they don't have an item, you just don't get it. I'd prefer to get an alert a day in advance so I can select a replacement item, but that's apparently not an option for whatever reason. The other is of course perishables. Usually it's fine. Sometimes the bananas are a bit greener than I'd like, sometimes they're a bit yellower than my son likes (he likes them green for some reason). Sometimes the use-by date is in two days when we were planning to use it in 3 days. Never got anything moldy, though if something's moldy, broken or otherwise wrong, you get a discount on the next purchase, no questions asked. Not having to lug groceries around is great. Sometimes we still need to go to the supermarket to get one or two items, but that's no big deal.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

Vadoff 6y ago

Yeah, if the experience was an automated warehouse in which you know you're getting exactly what you want (and if it's not listed, it means they don't have it), it would be a lot better. The whole checkout experience can be automated, and the final items only need to be picked up and delivered.

Androider 6y ago

Amazon's Whole Foods delivery in my area is now direct from warehouse to home instead of in-store picking. It's so, so much better than Instacart. On my last large order of almost a hundred items, not a single replacement, I got exactly what I ordered the same day. Instacart is such a sub-standard experience, it's just fundamentally the wrong approach and we wouldn't accept it for any other type of online purchase.

krustyburger 6y ago
They’re still in-store picking. It’s just that Whole Foods/Prime Now has dedicated employees for this.
- Androider 6y ago
  It's brand new as of April, it's definitely coming from a warehouse in an area where there is no Whole Foods store (I can track the path of the delivery van in the app). It's also not someone delivering with their own truck as before, but a blue-gray Amazon van, and the availability of items is spot on which was never the case even pre-covid.
  - krustyburger 6y ago
    Interesting. And you’re ordering from Whole Foods in the app and not just selecting Whole Foods items from the Amazon option? I know there are many Whole Foods items available on the Amazon section now.
sarah2079 6y ago
I have had the same experience with ordering Whole Foods and Amazon Fresh in the bay area. Everything I order arrives. I tried using a different grocery delivery and about 30% of what I ordered was out of stock. This was especially frustrating because delivery slots were in short supply here, so I felt rude making another small order immediately to fill in missing items. With WF/AF I at least know what is out of stock when making my order so I can choose my own substitutions or not bother trying to get ingredients for a recipe if something critical is missing.

clivestaples 6y ago

I've had almost the opposite experience. I got one questionable bag of onions. Otherwise, after five or six orders, I could not be happier.

iamthepieman 6y ago

Our local 3 store grocer offers shopping for 5$. You have to pick it up at the store but you don't have to go inside. They've been doing it for about a year. Never had a problem with it and their online interface is perfectly matched with their inventory. They text their replacements which you can reject before pickup.

tehwebguy 6y ago

Whole Foods / Amazon Fresh deliveries are like a thousand times better for me in west LA and come at very low cost. The chain of quality control is going to be a big reason that this moves back in-house IMO.

jedberg 6y ago

I'm the designated shopper in my family, since my wife has higher risk factors for COVID-19. Usually when we go shopping, I push the cart and pick the obvious items, but leave most of the picking to her because she's very specific in what she wants. But now I have to do it. I totally sympathize with the Instacart shoppers. Even with direct access to my wife via text including pictures, it's still hard to find exactly what she wants, and it takes a long time and a few passes through the store. They're not getting paid enough to care or do it right. Instacart needs to pay their pickers a lot more if they want it done right, but then of course they don't have a viable business model anymore.

jonny_eh 6y ago
Ha, same. I'll resort to facetime to figure out what that one thing she wants is.
- bradknowles 6y ago
  I hated, loathed, and despised doing the shopping for my wife at Whole Foods. It’s not the store that’s the problem, it’s that she wants to graze the entire bloody flipping hot bar, and she insists I get a bunch of stuff they don’t actually have in stock, or where they ran out of stock hours ago. She can shop for herself online, either via Whole Foods Market on Amazon, or Instacart. Either way, I’m done.

peterwwillis 6y ago

I like ordering groceries online, but I think the idea of instant grocery shopping is flawed. 1) You're depending on & supporting an oppressed segment of the labor force (people who need multiple jobs to make ends meet, because no 'gig economy' startup pays a living wage), 2) You're fighting with "surges" of use and paying wildly varying prices, with wildly varying levels of service, 3) You don't even get the items you're looking for half the time (in my experience), 4) It's more expensive!, 5) you don't actually need groceries delivered to you instantly. Since COVID-19 I have switched to buying from local businesses and getting food from Co-ops and farm shares (and growing my own). I can schedule regular deliveries of produce to my door in bulk (in reusable containers), which not only reduces waste, it actually helps me plan my week/month better, I still get all the things I wanted, the price is fair, and I'm helping local farms and businesses. I'm pretty sure the reason most people don't do this is that they're lazy, selfish, greedy and entitled. My evidence is the last two weekends I've ventured out into the world to look at apartments to rent, with the occasional jaunt to a hiking trail. I found virtually nobody was wearing a mask or socially distancing, unless they were forced to by a greeter in front of a business like a grocery store (many customers were trying to walk in without a mask, and thankfully were rebuffed). Many probably could have ordered online the same way I did, but would rather the immediacy of 'do it yourself' - even during a pandemic. Sadly it's the poorest and most vulnerable people that need grocery delivery the most, because they have the hardest time getting to a store. A poor person in a food desert may need to spend over two hours round trip on transportation in order to get food, and an elderly person may just not be mobile enough. I doubt we would ever fund a public delivery service for them (though in theory the postal service could).

mikecoles 6y ago

My first, and last, instacart experience had the shopper cancel all of the items in my order and then charge me a service fee. She said the store closed before she could do the shopping. The store was already closed when she selected my order to pick up. Setting the tip amount before the service is rendered is a horrible idea as well. Shop local at independent stores. The service and knowledge of the workers is worth it.

badwolf 6y ago

As someone without a car, I really want to like various grocery delivery services... Unfortunately every single time I've ordered groceries has been a less than stellar experience. Even Amazon Fresh.