Hacker News

points by resters 10 hours ago | 0 comments

I've been an instacart customer since it launched in NYC, and I've generally been quite happy, but the quality has been gradually on the decline.

- in the past few years, orders are frequently not received.

- in the past few years, fruit/produce is often covered in mold, rotten, or otherwise unacceptable.

- in the past few years, delivery time estimates are frequently missed.

- in the past few months, customer support got significantly worse and came to resemble the bad attitude and general grudging unhlelpfulness of AirBNB's support team.

I think the main issue has been a big shortage of supply of workers who are willing to do the job and who can do it well. Often times the person delivering the order (and the order itself) smells strongly of cigarette smoke, and increasingly I've had drivers refuse to bring the order to the door, etc.

Add to that the impact of the labor shortage on grocery stores that makes stocking less reliable and results in no availability of bags, greater chances of rotten produce, etc.

Instacart does stand behind it service and I have received full refunds for the non-delivered orders and the rotten produce, but such things must take a great toll on the profitability of the business.

[–] taurath 10 hours ago

Its not a labor shortage, its a shortage of people for whom doing the job can pay the bills they need paid.

The answer is not to find new pools of desperate people but to improve working conditions (pay, benefits) and on a macro level reducing cost of living so the people performing the work don't have to work so much they stop being able to.

The way you COULD do that is to reduce administrative cost. From their most recent filing, marketing costs them 1/4 of their revenue, R&D (software development) 1/5th, and operations and administration 1/8th each. Their cost of revenue aka what they pay to their "shoppers" aka lower-class labor and the businesses they integrate with is 1/4th of gross, barely a pittance compared to the slush funds for management and investor payouts.

Take a look yourself: https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001579091/a4bcc10...

Bottom line: they are making money hand over fist, with the vast vast majority not going to workers but the corporate employees and investors. Your issue with delivery drivers is an issue with the bottom-of-the-barrel treatment decided by management - they could solve this problem (EASILY), but they choose not to in order to pay for more corporate employees and to have more profit to shareholders. The numbers are clear as day.

[–] weakfish 9 hours ago

> Its not a labor shortage, its a shortage of people for whom doing the job can pay the bills they need paid.

I think this fact is often missed by middle/upper-middle-class tech folks (like a majority of this forum). From up here, it's eas to view labor as being an equitable exchange between two parties, but as you said, that is simply not the case when the pay doesn't even come close to covering expenses.

The refrain I often hear is that those people should then just work harder and get a better job - but then the question is, who delivers the food? To which I have yet to hear a satisfying answer (besides incentivizing better wages for those workers)

[–] taurath 8 hours ago

> The refrain I often hear is that those people should then just work harder and get a better job

These are folks who've never had to work a low wage job where bathroom breaks are tightly controlled, except maybe for fun money. I started working at 14, and as a software dev today I've never had to work nearly as hard, or be as utterly exhausted as working these sorts of jobs, which if you are having to do them to pay rent, its difficult or impossible to do extracurriculars like education or networking to move forward.

Imagine your entire workday is on a strict, short term set of timers and if you don't complete a task for any reason an automated rating goes down, and if it happens more than 3 times you are let go. People don't understand the level of stress that carries.

[–] resters 4 hours ago

I drove Uber Eats for one day a few years ago (as an experiment) and it was way harder than I had imagined. Seemingly no buildings have numbers on them, and it took tremendous effort to find which door to knock on in most apartment complexes, and the tips were lousy and the pay was horrible.

[–] resters 4 hours ago

I agree, I think the job is very difficult and does not pay well and so it's hard to find people who want to do it. I'm also aware that I could pay an assistant $100 to shop for me, and the reason I choose Instacart is because the service is not all that expensive.

While it could be a case of capitalist greed, it could also be a case of strategic misalignment of incentives for workers (too little pay, insufficient incentive to keep the job, etc.)

Note that I said I have been a customer for a long time, not that I know how well the company is managed or whether it understands incentives for its workers enough to thrive. This news about acquisition suggests perhaps its model was not working.

It could also be a casualty of the immigration crackdown on labor availability, or a consequence of inflation on tips (when the groceries already seem overpriced bc of inflation, maybe tips are lower), etc.

[–] taurath 2 hours ago

The management of the company does literally everything it can to ensure it doesn’t even have to pay drivers minimum wage and spends hundreds of millions to block minimum wage pay regulations in any municipality bold enough to try to stop them. It gets washed as “just business” but they are ruthlessly extractive.

[–] throwup238 10 hours ago

My nephew is currently doing UE/DD/Instacart to make ends meet and if their experience is reflective, most of their customers deserve shitty service. I helped them write some scripts to analyze data from Gridwise (delivery+mileage tracking app) and the tips average around 3-5% of the gross. Even in California with Prop 22, that's not going to add up to a livable wage.

Don't be surprised when the permanent underclass you depend on doesn't give a shit about your moldy strawberries.

[–] twostorytower 9 hours ago

They should be paid a livable wage before tips.

[–] throwup238 9 hours ago

Yeah that’s what everyone says, but no one wants to pay for it. That’s why California voted for Prop 22 instead of our courts forcing the rideshare companies to treat their drivers as employees.

[–] taurath 6 hours ago

They could literally double the pay of every single driver and still make a profit, but they won't because the drivers "choice" of who to work for carries no market power whatsoever. Here in Seattle we passed a min wage for drivers, and Doordash promptly increased their fees to customers by 30-50%, making it the most expensive place to get delivery in the country. They didn't need to do so, except as a warning to other municipalities not to. Then they tell everyone that its the fault of the minimum wage workers that the fees are high, and not their decisions

[–] kevin_thibedeau 10 hours ago

The whole gig economy is just underpaid servants as a service. Don't be surprised that they do a less than exemplary job.

[–] resters 4 hours ago

Sorry to break it to you, so are nearly all middle class jobs.

[–] rtkwe 10 hours ago

It's the lifecycle of many gig-economy apps. They start out good and slowly degrade as they plateau and try to find ways to cut expenses to continue growing.

[–] taurath 6 hours ago

They spend $3b of their $4b in revenue on corporate employees, $500m on restaurant "subsidies" and drivers, and the rest goes to stock buybacks ($8b last year). If they want to find ways to cut expenses, they need to look in their offices not on the street.

[–] gabruoy 9 hours ago

Labor shortages, in general, just don’t exist. There can be one time shocks like during Covid, but if there is a lack of workers for a specific job or industry, it means that the business is either unwilling to pay for the employees needed for the job, or that the business itself should not function as the cost of the labor needed is unsustainable.

[–] taurath 6 hours ago

Oh these aren't "employees", these are lower caste "gig workers". They could double their pay and still make a profit, according to their latest quarterly filing. Their largest expensive, 5x of what they pay their drivers, is corporate employees, whether executives or software developers or marketers or salespeople.

[–] carlosjobim 9 hours ago

If you want a good servant for a cheap price, you will only find it in a non-industrialized country. In an industrialized nation, all labour is gobbled up by industrially organized employment, because your average labourer produces hundreds of times more value in such employment compared to non-industrial employment. And in this includes restaurants for your food.

There's a reason why supermarkets went from having different counters for asking for your stuff to having you pick out your stuff yourself.

[–] mvdtnz 10 hours ago

You've continued to use a service for a "few years" while it provides you with rotten fruit?

[–] resters 5 hours ago

I'd rather occasionally get a rotten item that has to be refunded than go to the supermarket, collect everything into a cart, and then wait 15 minutes to pay and check out, carry everything home, etc. The service provides a tremendous value, the issue is just the marginal cases where the quality control is poor.

[–] mrguyorama 10 hours ago

A large part of increasing profit margins for the past 40 years is that companies have realized that https://xkcd.com/325/ is an insane underestimate of consumer stickiness.

You can ship people literal trash like ten percent of the time and they will keep coming back.

You can provide someone negative value for decades, and they keep paying you.

I just cannot understand how willing to burn time, effort, and money on stupid purchases the average person is. I know I have poverty brain and used to be really bad at just spending money, but the fact of the matter is that PepsiCo had to increase the price of Doritos to $7 a bag before they saw a decline in purchasing.

Like, there are entire industries devoted to helping people figure out they are subscribed to something they don't use anymore. I don't even look at my bank account anymore but how do you possibly let that happen?

I cannot understand just how consumer brained everyone is.

[–] taurath 6 hours ago

> I cannot understand just how consumer brained everyone is.

I can - its a collection of hundreds of PHD-level human behavior psychologists across many companies finding ways to "hack" behavior to increase revenue, vs 1 exhausted customer who just needs something basic and doesn't have the time, money or experience to be discerning in what they buy. Ad companies know more about customers and their behavior than the people are aware of themselves. They hoover up your data, run an alg to determine the patterns of your life and the lives of everyone like you, and target both online and in person various inflection points to drive you towards behavior they want.

You have both product, marketing, and sales all contributing to a mass manipulation, and for this they are rewarded with extra resources to start new companies to do more manipulation.

[–] throwaway27448 10 hours ago

> I think the main issue has been a big shortage of supply of workers who are willing to do the job

Instacart is profitable, yea? So they don't want to provide a better quality service or they would offer greater incentives to workers.

[–] resters 4 hours ago

I would think so, I have been thinking recently that I will stop using it based on the decline in quality. It's really frustrating.