I'm not sure who these are for, but it definitely isn't me.
According to some back-of-the-napkin math I did:
- Most items are marked up 16%
- There's a ~$5-15 service fee (that's WITH Instacart+)
- And most of the sources I saw showed that you should tip between 10-20% (which they deserve, given what I've seen of how they're paid).
While I could absolutely see using the service if I was having a party and couldn't leave to pick up some forgotten items, paying $60-80 extra on top of my $200 grocery bill is too rich for my blood.
Yeah, when I used it the first time I was in awe, but over time I removed their apps and I just walk to the supermarket.
Their prices are quite high, delivery time is unpredictable (even though their app says 10-15min, sometimes I had to wait 30-40min), and their inventory is limited. I still use them once every 2 months or so, but on a weekly basis I'd just rather go to a local supermarket myself.
My biggest issue is the high rate of failure with fresh produce. I remember when one of my orders came in with a bag of organic sweet potatoes, with the claim that the organic Russet I had ordered were "out of stock." I was doing a specific recipe, so ended up having to go to the same supermarket from which I had just had my groceries delivered (thinking, perhaps I could get singles or non-organic).
The bags of organic Russet were right there, right next to the organic sweet potatoes.
On that same order, the bananas that came were so green that they wouldn't ripen for three weeks. When I've had groceries delivered, issues like this are the rule, not the exception.
At this point the emergence (or re-emergence) of the instant grocery startup in is like the apocryphal story of Joseph Kennedy getting stock tips from his shoe-shine boy - a sign that the market is about to crash.
