i am not entirely sure what they mean by that. the service fee goes 100% towards the shopper fleet and is an essential part of a reasonable compensation structure for all of our shoppers -- if we switched entirely to tips, the folks that (e.g.) actually picked out your groceries, checked out & staged your groceries at the store, would not be compensated. this is because tips have to go 100% to one person, which would only be the delivery person -- and in our case, any one order is handled by many people to be efficient.
I’m a “full-service shopper” in a zone without any in-store teams, meaning that I do the shopping and the delivering. Since I’ve started, I have only seen the order commissions steadily deteriorate to the point that they are now about half of what they used to be a year ago.
I can assure you and anyone else reading that the so-called service fee is not going to any of us in the field. And many customers have stopped tipping assuming that the service fee is a tip.
I suppose OP's point wasn't that a service fee wasn't justifiable, just that it's a bit odd to make it optional and have it auto-selected, though given someone else's comment it seems like now it's mandatory.
i know there has been a lot of changes with that recently -- i agree also that is odd. there are a ton of legal nuances here that i do not want to get into, but suffice to say we want to be clear and transparent to customers while at the same time providing a compelling wage to all the folks who touch your order during any part of the lifecycle.
Which is why Instacart is going to get crushed. Fee exists because instacart is not an integrated service. Supermarket margins are thin. They will only shrink more.
There's no reason why grocery store employees cannot fill orders - in fact grocery stores that do their own deliveries do exactly that. What those grocery stores lack is a platform to synchronize active inventory in a store and what is displayed which is exactly what Amazon brings to Whole Foods in addition to "intelligent" order routing:
There are three whole foods in Manhattan that are convenient to downtown - however, during the rush our one needs to be an idiot to send an order to the one on 7th Ave rather than the one in Tribeca, which is definitely not the case during the late afternoon.
What really amazes me is that both executives and people who work for companies like Instacart simply stomp their feet and say "But we are different! Why do you hate us?!" rather than address deficiency of the business model. Want to have a shot at competing with AmazonWF? Become a sub of Ahold, Kroger, Albertsons or SuperValu. Otherwise you die.
P.S. I dislike Amazon. I do, however, have to admit that buying WF was a brilliant move.
