We completed our first Instacart transaction today, and it was satisfactory; however, there were a few things that we either had to hunt for or discovered in the process. For the purposes of passing this on to others, here’s an account of our experience and what we learned.
Let’s walk through the experience first.
You’ll be presented with a group of stores that are in your area that Instacart will shop at. On Instacart’s website they have the stores broken down in three pricing types:
- Stores that the Instacart price is the same as the in-store price,
- those that the price is higher than in-store price and finally,
- those that are mixed… some higher, some the same.
The store we normally shop at, Safeway, had higher prices, so we chose to go with Fry’s Food and Drug, which had the same pricing model.
The Online Shopping Experience
The shopping app is easy enough to navigate, with pictures of the various items and pricing. We chose about 30 items, with an approximate total of $140. In some cases we would be told that an item was out of stock, or, more often, that the item was in low supply. In which case, it would prompt us to select an alternative and would make a suggestion. In the two or three instances, the suggestions were generally satisfactory.
One case was a bit weird. I chose a box of frozen crunchy taquitos. It warned me it was low and suggested crunchy beef and cheese chimichangas from the same company as an alternative.
This was a new product that I was not familiar with but sounded intriguing. I wanted to try them, instead, I chose the option of “don’t replace” for the taquitos and then proceeded to add the chimichangas to my purchase list as a separate item. It immediately told me they were low on them and suggested the crunchy taquitos as an alternate.
The circular logic of this was a little odd. (For the record, in the end, we only managed to get one box of chimichangas and no taquitos.)
When you complete your order you pay through the app and apply the tip for the shopper. I’ll discuss pricing later. They place a hold on your credit card for an amount greater than, but not unreasonably so, the amount of your order. In our case, it was a $190 hold.
Between the time you complete shopping and when the shopper is dispatched to the store, you have the option of adding or deleting items. This was handy because we didn’t do the most organized job of shopping and added a couple extra items along the way. Because the hold was larger, they did not require additional charges to add items.
One of the options you can choose is to let the shopper leave your groceries at your front door without interacting with you, which I can’t see how that works, but since we knew we’d be home and we ordered ice cream, that just seemed a non-starter.
Scheduling
Things are weird right now. Stores are running low on everyday items. Delivery services are experiencing unprecedented demand. I don’t think we can say that the Instacart schedule experience was typical. It wasn’t bad, but it probably wasn’t typical.
We placed our order late on Wednesday. We were presented with two options, either a scheduled time slot, the earliest being Monday of the following week, or “whenever available”, which would be any time between Friday and Sunday of the current week. As we were in no hurry, and home all day, but didn’t want to wait till the next week, we chose the as-available option. We were told we would receive a notice when shopping began.
Each day I checked the app to see what it had to say, each day the window for shopping shrank. First Friday through Sunday, then Saturday through Sunday, and finally just Sunday. At least it didn’t start adding days on the end.
The Shopping Event
8:00 AM Sunday morning I got a notice from Instacart that my shopper was starting shopping. It is not uncommon for us to sleep in well past 8:00 AM on Sundays, but as it happens, I was awake. This could have been a very different experience if we’d slept through it and left the shopper to their own devices.
The notice included the name of the shopper and the ability to chat with them. Soon thereafter I started getting notices that they had substituted items. The first was perfectly reasonable. The store brand of baby spinach was out, and so they substituted the name-brand equivalent. No problem. It appeared that this was “done deal” based on the notice I got; however, when I went into the app, I noticed that it gave me the option to approve or make an alternate request. None needed, so I approved it.
Next we had a box of standard cheddar goldfish crackers for my kids, and they were out, so the shopper substituted “Flavor-bast goldfish.” Which I think is an improvement; however, for whatever strange reason, my kids won’t eat them.
In this case, I did not approve the substitution, but instead recommended a smaller box of the standard goldfish. I took this opportunity to use the chat and told the shopper why I rejected it.
Once the shopper knew I was there and actively paying attention, we got a lot more interactive. There were several other items that weren’t in stock, but now I would get a photo of the picked over shelves and asked “what would you like me to pick from what’s here?”
This worked pretty well, although it was sometimes a bit difficult to tell what was on the shelf. On some occasions he just listed the alternative. For example, we wanted Mission Brand taco seasoning, and I just got a question that said, “they don’t have Mission, but they have Ortega or Pepe Sanchez brand which would you like?”
I don’t know if their system favors sending the same shopper to the same account every time, but I could see how if you got a “regular” shopper, they would begin to know your preferences and get better at it.
Even though we made a lot of the choices via chat, they always ended up in the app for me to approve, which was fine.
He let me know when he was done shopping, and then a few minutes later he let me know that Fry’s didn’t have enough checkers working and the lines were long and that it would be a while.
We had a couple jokes about everybody thinking Easter morning at 8:00AM would probably be empty and they all went shopping.
The Fry’s is two miles from my house, and my groceries arrived in about 15 minutes from when he finished checking out, which is a little longer than I would expect, but I’m familiar with the drive to my house and he wasn’t. It certainly wasn’t unreasonably long, and my ice cream was in a cold bag to keep it frozen.
He thoughtfully brought the ice cream to the door first so we could get it into the freezer ASAP. He, and an assistant, brought all the groceries to my doorstep, set them down outside, and with cheery wave through the screen door and six feet of social distancing that separated us and a hearty! “hi-yo, Silver away,” he was gone.
Ok, he didn’t really say that, but I imagined it as he drove away.
The Pricing
There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch and that goes for grocery delivery, too. Instacart offers two plans, one is a subscription service which eliminates the delivery fee. Obviously, for a trial run, we didn’t opt for that option, instead paying the delivery fee, which is a remarkably cheap $3.99 – if you’ve ordered more than $35 worth of merchandise. That’s what you’ll find on a casual look at the website. In fact, it’s a price so cheap you have to ask, “how the hell is this a viable business model?”
Dig a bit deeper and you discover that Instacart charges a 5% service charge, which, on our order worked out to about $6, plus the $3.99 and it was $10 total.
But it doesn’t stop there, and here’s an area that I really want some clarification on. Does the shopper get any of that? Instacart also charges a tip, which is technically optional, but morally not. The default amount is also 5%, but we bumped it to an even $10. Instacart is quick to point out that 100% of the tip goes to the shopper, but is that all they get?
A little weird is that you pick the tip before it’s even been assigned to a shopper. In fact, there are rumors that the shoppers pick and chose which jobs to take first on based on the tip. There are further rumors that buyers sometimes put a big tip to lure rapid service, then change it afterwards (which you are allowed to do) to a lower amount. The flaw in that system is apparent.
I tested the “change tip” system and bumped my shopper a couple more bucks along with a five-star rating.
Is There Even More Cost?
Yes. Yes, there is.
One of the “options” presented on your account is to attach store loyalty cards. We have loyalty card for both the store we normally shop, Safeway, and for the backup store that we used for this Instacart experiment, Fry’s.
You can save quite a bit of money using loyalty cards, but unfortunately, neither Safeway nor Fry’s were included. (It does say that more stores are coming soon.)
This was not a deal-breaker, but disappointing. It certainly means that without the loyalty cards, we would be inclined to not use Instacart on a regular basis until they implement.
I have my doubts they ever will.
Along with our groceries, we also got the actual store receipt. This allowed me to compare what we were charged by Instacart and what they paid in the store. They don’t match, but I was able to reconcile it, and, of course, the difference is in Instacart’s favor.
The prices quoted on their site, and charged, are the listed store prices, so, to be clear: I paid what I was quoted and expected to pay, so I am making no assertion that a “fast one” was pulled.
Instacart has their own loyalty savings card which was used on the transaction. This resulted in a VIP shopper savings to them of $3.81, which they pocket. It doesn’t sound like much, but remember my 5% service fee was only around $6. This is like paying for another 2-3% in addition to the service fee.
Chump change, right? Not to Instacart it isn’t.
At the bottom of the receipt, Fry’s thoughtfully provides the year-to-date savings for that loyalty card. The bottom of my receipt proudly says, “Annual Card Savings $681,736.25.”
It’s mid-April. That’s a 3.5 month take, representing an average of over $6,600/day, for just one supermarket chain in their network.
And who knows how regional that is? Fry’s is a Kroger store. Does that tally include other Kroger brand supermarkets or just Fry’s? Is it regional or nationwide?
Having that kind of money coming in on the margins is why I doubt they’ll ever implement loyalty cards. It’s a dead loss for them to do so.
Let me posit that this is an area ripe for abuse, too. For example, citing my spinach example above. I asked for the cheapest spinach because… it’s spinach, and it has no place in the home or kitchen whatsoever. That notwithstanding, my family wanted spinach. Fine. But I’m not spending money on “premium” spinach if I don’t have to. The item I selected was $1.99, but they were sold out, and the replacement cost $2.29.
Now, this didn’t happen, but what if the replacement had a VIP loyalty card savings of $0.30? Could a situation arise where the shopper, realizing a more expensive alternative would net more back to Instacart might base their on-the-spot decisions to Instacart’s advantage? Would there be any incentive for them to do so? Could that include perhaps “overlooking” and item in stock in favor of an alternative?
I was active and participating in the shopping, but it’s clear that the shoppers have some autonomy to use their discretion if you are not available when they’re shopping.
There is absolutely no whiff of anything like this happening in my dealings with Instacart, but like the rumored tip juggling I mentioned before, humans will find a way to game a system to their advantage if they can.
Finally, and this is just the most minor of things…. We bought two carrots and the prices just don’t match. Instacart charged us for 0.5 lbs. of carrots but the receipts says 0.45 lbs. of carrots, for a net discrepancy of $0.05.
At a guess, I’d say that Instacart rounds up to the nearest half pound. That feels a bit like those clever (yet dishonest and misguided) programmers that once figured out that they calculate interest earned on savings accounts and funneled the truncation error into a separate account and accumulated a fortune.
Conclusion
All in all, it’s a handy service and the process worked well. The final breakdown on pricing was:
- $118.26 groceries (per store receipt)
- Delivery fee: $3.99
- Service Fee: $6.10
- Tip: $12.21
- Carrot scandal: $0.05
- Loyalty Savings Lost: $3.81
Total of fees/tips/charges: $26.16
Fees as percentage of total grocery purchase: 22.1%
22% does seem just a bit much for it to ever be our go-to option for grocery shopping.