
Instacart announces new Covid-19 policies and plans to hire 250k more shoppers - rafaelc
https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/23/instacart-announces-new-covid-19-policies-and-plans-to-hire-250000-more-shoppers/
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nprz
Grocery stores should really just turn themselves into warehouses and only
allow workers in the store. Grocery stores could provide safer working
conditions by checking temps of employees before entering the store and
providing masks and gloves for all workers. This would help mitigate the risk
of covid exposure for both employees and customers.

~~~
chirau
Not everyone can afford delivery fees, especially with these layoffs. And
those fees are not small at all hey.

~~~
wegs
Those fees are for everyone's safety. If other people have deliveries, I'm
less likely to get sick and die.

Delivery fees should be part of the stimulus.

If everyone who can afford them paid delivery fees for everyone who can't,
we'd all come out way ahead, both health-wise and economically. This is one of
the biggest economic no-brainers since some states started making everyone
wear a $2 cloth face mask to reduce R0.

~~~
standardUser
"If other people have deliveries, I'm less likely to get sick and die."

Outside of the very worst-hit parts of the world, going shopping while taking
precautions does not seem to be capable of raising the transmission rate to
unacceptable levels. We're not trying to prevent every and all infection, only
to keep the rate of new infections at a sustainable level.

~~~
wegs
Why do you say that?

The US seems to have an R0 of right around 1 with lockdowns. Shopping is the
major place people continue to intermingle.

If we brought R0<<1, the virus would die off. If R0 > 1, we all get sick
eventually.

And aside from that, school and work closures are much more expensive than
food delivery. The ROI of not having everyone congregate in stores seems huge
in comparison.

~~~
standardUser
I say that because I don't think anyone expects the virus to die off, save for
a mutation or herd immunity (via vaccine or otherwise). Lockdowns are not and
never were intended to kill the virus. Only to control the spread.

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gnrlst
My biggest gripe with this headline is the word "hire". Let's rephrase that
to: "250k shoppers signed up". They were not hired. They don't have benefits,
they don't have medical, and they are most definitely not employees.

~~~
gms
The word 'hire' has nothing to do with whether the job is full-time or part-
time: it applies to both (e.g. 'I hired a babysitter').

~~~
masonic
"Hiring" a babysitter means you have engaged her/him for a specific period and
compensation commitment. Otherwise, you're just adding them to your Contacts.

Instacart hasn't _hired_ these people in any traditional sense, they've just
added those people to their Contacts with no compensation commitment.

~~~
cwhiz
That is your definition of hire but it is not what the actual definition of
the word is or implies. You can hire a babysitter, 1099 contractor, W2
employee, day laborer, and so on and so forth.

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toomuchtodo
Anyone know if they've fixed the bug where someone could set the tip to $50
and then remove it entirely at or after delivery ("tip baiting")?

[https://nypost.com/2020/04/10/people-are-baiting-grocery-
del...](https://nypost.com/2020/04/10/people-are-baiting-grocery-delivery-
workers-with-big-tips-then-reneging/)

~~~
choward
You're supposed to tip? I tried Safeway delivery and there was no option to
tip. Tipping needs to just go away. It's completely arbitrary.

~~~
ineedasername
In order for tipping to go away, the employer needs to provide a higher level
of compensation equal to the average $tips typically earned. But companies
like tipping because it offloads some of the salary burden as an additional
line-item expense to the buyer.

~~~
takeda
the companies won't increase wage unless people stop tipping, why increase
wage if employees are happy?

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tmpz22
As a consumer I highly recommend Amazon Fresh. No pre-paid tip bull shit if
you don't want to and in 50+ deliveries I've had exactly one bad experience
that I left a customer support inquiry about - which never repeated itself.

Amazon logistics are unmatched and there is a very clean continuity between
deliveries that shows quality control or at least per-location notes on
accessing buildings and units efficiently.

Down side is you have to refresh the checkout page throughout the day in order
to get a delivery window. Sometimes you luck out and can get same-day
delivery, sometimes you have to wait a couple days.

~~~
CamperBob2
_Sometimes you luck out and can get same-day delivery, sometimes you have to
wait a couple days._

Which is ridiculous. Why don't they just let me schedule the delivery up to,
say, 2 weeks out? They'd retain more customers _and_ smooth out the demand
spikes that are as bad for retailers as they are for consumers.

~~~
wolco
Stock availability changes on fresh food in two weeks.

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CamperBob2
Especially when you can't predict demand because you're intentionally
rejecting valid market signals.

I don't need a two-hour window. Let me order a week in advance, with a two-
_day_ window. This will work better than what they're doing now, which
basically isn't working at all.

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ineedasername
Are there 250k people that are willing to work a job like this right now?
Sure, there's lots of unemployed, but for at least the next few months they're
getting ~60% of their base salary (up to some cap) + an additional $600/week.

~~~
20years
One of my friends sons is making $300 to $500 per day working Instacart right
now. Partly because where we live the demand is high and there are not enough
Instacarters to meet that demand. The delivery time is currently at least 3
days out. He is young and healthy so he doesn't really have that fear.

~~~
buryat
500*365 = $182,500

that's amazing

~~~
TeMPOraL
As it should be. Food delivery in an emergency is a critical service, and
should be rewarded appropriately.

~~~
ineedasername
not only critical-- lots of jobs are critical (janitor) but don't pay much.
This is also hazardous right now. Look at some of the worst states like NJ &
NY right now: There's mini outbreaks at a lot of supermarkets.

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blakesterz
"In March, the company announced it will hire 300,000 new full-service
shoppers on top of its existing 200,000 shoppers. It has since met that goal,
and with today’s hiring news, Instacart’s shopper network will be 750,000
shoppers. The company also announced earlier this month that it is more than
doubling its care team, from 1,200 agents to 3,000 agents."

I am really surprised they have that many people doing this work! That's not
meant to be a comment on the work or the people or anything, just those
numbers are HUGE. I had no idea they had so many people.

~~~
A4ET8a8uTh0
I was too. But then I ran across a thread on nextdoor a week or so ago. Long
story short, the poster wanted a legit company as opposed to some random
person purchasing stuff. I thought of explaining to the person that a random
person is really what you get anyway, but I thought better of it. People do
trust a company. They seem to think they do some sort of basic security check.

~~~
wolco
Or the ability to refund if something goes wrong.

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ineedasername
I know, slightly off-topic, but I wish instacart didn't mark up the price of
each item. It feels like it lacks transparency and is some sort of dark
pattern because I don't know how much I'm paying for, say, food and how much
I'm paying instacart. I'd much rather see a flat % fee, say 10% or something.

~~~
koolba
That’s because it is a dark pattern of hiding the true price through death by
a thousand fees.

They try to get you from every angle. They mark up the price. They add a
service fee. They add a delivery fee. They add a tip (which is its own can of
worms...)

If it was just “Buy whatever you want at regular price but we’ll throw on $40”
a lot of people would balk.

~~~
JMTQp8lwXL
Airbnb is also a very big user of this pattern. You can't search by total
price, including fees, just the base nightly rate: which makes it difficult to
compare options, since one host might have a $20 cleaning fee, and another has
a $250 one.

That can make a big difference in total price for short (2-3 night) stays.

I end up with 40 browser tabs. Oh, and if you want to book via mobile app,
they charge more for that. Have to use a web browser for the best price.

~~~
davidsawyer
I built a browser extension to help mitigate this type of issue. A lot of
people like to think about the cost of lodging in terms of nightly price as
opposed to the total, so the extension shows the true nightly price of a stay,
after account for all fees, taxes, etc. Unfortunately, right now there's not a
great way to get the true* totals to show up in search results, but the
extension will show you the real price per night of your stay once you're on a
place's listing page.

Chrome: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/airbnb-price-
per-n...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/airbnb-price-per-night-
co/lijeilcglmadpkbengpkfnkpmcehecfe)

Firefox: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/airbnb-
price-...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/airbnb-price-per-
night-correct/)

And it's completely open source: [https://github.com/davidsawyer/airbnb-price-
per-night-correc...](https://github.com/davidsawyer/airbnb-price-per-night-
correcter)

*Airbnb leaves out taxes in their "totals", which can skew the true total by a significant amount

~~~
JMTQp8lwXL
I'm more forgiving about taxes being left out, only because it's an equal
percentage for each listing. If I have a map of 10 listings, and they're all
N% less than they should be -- I can still somewhat easily compare them, as
they are all equally wrong.

There might be edge cases to my thinking, as if you map view listings along a
jurisdictional boundary, there may be taxes in one city and not another.

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sitkack
Instacart needs to fix basically everything, it is in the name but they fail
pretty hard at even being a cart and the web app is slow due to client side
javascript. Looks like they are competing with AirBnB in how broken their web
apps are. Hell some items exist, but are shadowed and in accessible presumably
due to id and class collisions.

~~~
Beefin
honest question: is server side processing generally preferred? if so, why has
there been much more evolution on the JS front than on the Node/Django/RoR
front?

~~~
sitkack
Instacarts web 11/7ths SPA is slow through their own ineptness. Instacart has
failed in that no one should be talking about their site.

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shaunxcode
This sounds exciting but without UBI and UHC (housing and health) it just
feels like a half measure. Engaging in necessary skilled labor is the ideal
(liberal arts and sciences) - the next best is un-skilled necessary labor
(grocery delivery lives here) and after that skilled un-necessary labor (eg
visual and audible/musical arts skills crafts games) and finally that leaves
us with un-skilled in-necessary labor (Vices live here). If we have universal
mutual aid as a guiding principal it would let people move towards where they
need and want to be as their lower level maslavian needs would be apriori.

The reality as well is that many necessary forms of labor can be fulfilled by
unskilled labor if we try (Automation lives here).

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chrisco255
Yeah, who pays for that? You burden half the population with 50 hour work
weeks to pay for the other half to sit on their ass? You call liberal arts
"necessary"? No, farming and trucking is necessary. Blue collar labor is
necessary. White collar labor is a luxury.

~~~
malandrew
I would go further. If no one is willing to pay for it, it isn't labor, it's a
hobby/leisure.

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paulcole
Oh wow, 250,000 new employees? That’s a lot of benefits and overhead this is
going to cost them.

~~~
jedimastert
> That’s a lot of benefits and overhead this is going to cost them.

There are no benefits. It's independent labor

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paulcole
Are you positive about that?

I would’ve thought the U.S. government would crack down on a tech company
pulling a stunt like that?

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shashanoid
> Last month, some Instagram shoppers went on strike.

