Instacart reviews

I've only just started working about a month ago so I'll change this review if needed but currently my thoughts are this : they are not a people / customer oriented company. They pressure you to be faster, which I get it - speed and delivering to the customer quickly is a great thing - but they take it too far. First off, 90% of the time they send me to a store location that is not the closest one to the customer & you don't find that out until after you've already checked out of the store. That leads to the second off, there tends to be a lot of items that the store location might not carry and if you would have sent me to the location closest to the customer then that location probably would have had their items because when a customer is ordering their stuff through the app they are thinking about the location that they usually shop at which tends to be the one closest to them. Also when I'm picking a replacement I like to send the customer a message to ask them what they would prefer and talk to them about it and that makes my speed go down and it makes me look bad. I get all great reviews for my customer because I talk to them throughout all of it but instacart thinks I'm not so great because my speed goes down. So unnecessary pressure. And now, I've just checked my earnings adding today's rates + per item of the order I just did and I was underpaid. If you add in my tip, I'm not underpaid but the tip isn't suppose to count, that's extra money for me, not for you to pay me with. At the end of every shift they give you an opportunity to provide feedback and it's like I'm talking to a computer because they do not communicate with you at all they'll send messages but you can't reply to them and when I put something in the feedback I don't get an email back or anything telling me "Oh hey Samantha I read your feedback and this is what happened", nope I get silence. They should strive to be there for their employees and to be more customer oriented. Speed is great but accuracy and the customers satisfaction is what should be top priority. Then don't even get me started on hours. In order to get first dibs on hours you have to work 90 hours within 3 weeks so average 30 hours a week or 25 weekend hours over 3 weeks, which I only have time for about 15 a week so I have to wait to pick my hours and by the time I get to pick my hours there's hardly anything so I get more like 5 a week which I don't appreciate. I understand letting people who work more get to pick their hours first but why does it have to be from Sunday to Wednesday why can't it the people who work more get to pick Sunday and the people who work less get to pick Monday and why does it have to be so many hours to meet the requirement to get to pick on Sunday I want to work 15 hours but you're not even giving me the opportunity to work 15 hours.

Their underlying motto is quantity over quality. They don’t care about hiring quality, professional employees. They don’t do background checks. All they care about is that you shop a ridiculously fast pace. They provide an hour of training and then send you off on your own. They don’t care about quality customer service, because the don’t give the shopper enough time for that, to talk to the customer and make a good replacement for them if needed. The whole job is done in an app that often has issues, and doesn’t take into account lots of different variables on the job. At the end the of each shift you get a number of your average speed for the day. If you have completed a certain number of orders with the company, and your speed isn’t 60 seconds per item, they fire you. But before they do, they provide “coaching,” which is really your shift lead doing 1 order with you, to get your time for that order down. They don’t give you any special tricks to be faster, but you end up faster for that specific order because 2 people doing the job is faster than 1. It doesn’t matter if you are a quality employee or if your customers are happy. It doesn’t matter if you are improving. All that matters is that you meet that goal so that Instacart can get more orders. That’s how they get paid. This can be unrealistic a lot of times when you consider having to wait in long store lines or waiting for meat to be cut at the deli counter. They don’t pay attention to details and they set you up for failure. I was told that I would make an hourly wage plus 20% of the service fee given to Instacart for each order. But that didn’t align with what I actually got in my paycheck. I was lied to.