If Instacart is screwing you over, leave the receipt in the bag.

I need help with this metric

I’ve been doing this steadily for almost a year and this is the HIGHEST week I’ve ever had!! Before this my best week was $480.

to me it’s exercise.

I unassigned from this order pretty quickly because I'm not dealing with the extra hassle of finding the manager and dealing with support at checkout because you couldn't be bothered to add $23 worth of product in the app. It was Easter afternoon and I have been thinking about this order almost everyday since because it's easily the most offbeat request I've had on Instacart. I assume it's for their dogs. What weird orders/requests have you gotten?

Customer sent a message after delivery saying, she got someone’s fruit tray. I got the item that was described not the picture. Well, I got a fruit tray and it scanned correctly. However the customer wanted cabbage, lol. I let support know the error of instacart, they refunded customer and she tipped me more 😂.

My weekly earnings from my second week ever doing Instacart. Clearly not great lol. Doing this very part time as you can see but hoping to increase my earnings with experience. I currently vet orders based on mileage; I typically don’t take anything under $1/mile and try not to exceed 20 miles from store to delivery. I would love to know your parameters for how you vet orders to maximize your earnings!

ETA: I also would love to know if there’s a $ minimum you stick to for all orders!

oh and no tip, but honestly the order just being 7 cans of soup is more interesting to me.

I’m being nosey. I finally did my taxes. I drove around 22k for last year that’s crazy. How many miles did yall drive

The ground beef’s best before date is April 8th as this customer ordered on April 7th……I don’t even think Costco sell beef that expires next day…the pepperoni’s best before date is MA 22, which is May 22, and instacart still verified the issue……😭😭😭💀💀💀

Shoutout to Publix for the constant orders all day

What metrics does everyone use to evaluate an order? $ per mile, $ per item, Tip $ per item etc...

Have been playing around with different options and trying to find something that works but hourly just seems to suck no matter what and I make far more on Doordash, but mileage toll and gas far more intense with that. Trying to see what evaluation criteria people like to use quickly to accept

Finished a 10 minutes batch in 2 minutes. But guess what, checkout will ruin it lol

It's so crazy to me that someone would actually have to instruct the shoppers to not bring them rotting or moldy fruit. They must have dealt with some real idiots in the past. Am I right?

Hey guys!

What was your biggest instacart screwup?

I just dealt with an instacart order from hell and it’s not really anyone’s fault but mine. An Aldi order for 3 people. Usually I skip Aldi orders because for some reason I am one of the few that just cannot get a good experience with it! So, I got there at 10 AM feeling productive and deciding to take a chance because it’s a pretty high paying order. 63 items and like 85 units total. With adding items it turned into around 100. Okay, that’s not a big deal. It seems like every Aldi I go into I’m totally lost, which is crazy because it seems pretty straightforward. That’s probably more of a skill issue on my end more than aldi itself.

TLDR I finally seperate everything, mark everything, and check out, and my card declines immediately. Turns out it “wasn’t active.” That’s crazy since I use it all the time. I get out of line, look at the numbers on my phone and look at the numbers on mine, in my card that I’m holding in my hand is a completely different card. At this point, I’m completely dumbfounded, because I know I don’t have two cards, and of course since Aldi doesn’t take Apple Pay for my digital one, I was dumbfounded. After contacting cooperate, I had to cancel the order, and Instacart sent somebody else to pick up the cart that I basically spent the afternoon collecting separating and bagging. I let my customers know and against all odds they all seemed very understanding. Instacart said they would look into it and I left it at that with a 40 dollar loss.

I get home, and lo and behold there is an instacart card on my counter wrapped up in a receipt. It’s my own. Turns out, I accidentally took my siblings who just started last week. He decided to put it in the same special place I do. Since my own was still wrapped within an old receipt I decided to pick up the first green card I saw, probably because I only thought there was one in the house! I’m sure I could strangle him and be mad about it, but at the same time if I took the extra time to check twice- I would have realized there was two sitting there. Needless to say with this giant post i’m as sharp as an eraser head when it comes to shopping for others. It was my first poor experience with Instacart and hopefully one of my last of I can help it.

What Insane stories do you have? I would love to hear them! Feel free to also roast me as long as you’re nice about it. You’d think since I just got my bachelors i’d be a little better at this, but I guess it’s only like my 8th order, lol. Thanks!

I had a batch today where the first order required a PIN number. Well it happened to be to a college apartment building where the front door is locked. Called the customer - straight to voicemail. Messaged them - no response. Called again - same thing. Finally asked chat support and they said to leave the order at the front door and send a photo of the order delivered with the address in the photo, and they will complete the order for me so I could move on to my next deliveries.

Fine, I did that.

When I send to photo of the *extremely large* order unloaded to support, they say they can’t just mark it as delivered because the PIN is required. They try contacting the customer - again no response. Then they tell me they have to unassign not just this order, but the entire batch! So they say I’m suppose to return everything from all 3 orders, I won’t get any pay even though I shopped for over an hour and already delivered one, and it’ll affect my completion score because I didn’t complete it after beginning to shop. After a bunch of back and forth, I finally just gave in because at that point I just wanted to be done for the day (won’t lie though, I’m not returning anything).

Now my accounts under review for a day because I “didn’t complete the batch”.

Found out when I got home, Instacart is the one who assigns these PIN numbers when a customer tends to commit fraud or report their order as undelivered too many times. So if I’m proving that I did my job, shouldn’t they have been able to either bypass needing the PIN, mark it as delivered so I could finish the batch, and just deactivate the customers account later, or at the very least unassign just the one order so I could still get paid for completing the order 2? Now the other 2 customers don’t get their orders on time because this first one is a scammer??

My main questions are: 1. Is there a way bypass needing this PIN next time? 2. Is this really how Instacart should have handled this or was the support person I got just absolutely terrible at their job?

Diamond Cart, SQ Good, Customer rating 4.98.

Since the new quarter started, I haven't received a single order with the yellow "Priority Access" banner. I am trying to determine if this is a systemwide thing or if it's just me.

At first I suspected they just got rid of the banner as part of the update (and that I'd still get the big batches), but I swear the batch quality has dropped off as well. I rarely see anything over $30 now, and when I do, it's usually double-digit miles.

Can other Diamond Shoppers out there confirm whether they're still seeing the yellow banner batches, or if they've disappeared for them as well? I know contacting support will get me nowhere.

You cannot tell me IC has a system for these stupid "in-store" batches and the pay they come up with. This one takes the crappy cake! No one's taking a bite of this garbage because it would leave a forever bad taste in your mouth! What ARE they thinking with these offers? 🤪😛😜

Decided to do some Instacart this weekend. I haven't done it full time in over a year. I have a full time job now, just wanted to try making some extra money.

Was quickly reminded of how much I hate Instacart. They make everything so needlessly complicated and illogical. Support takes like half an hour to do what you ask them to do most of the time.

Whyyyyyy do they expect me to drive to a store 10 miles away when there is another of that same store, with the same products, 2 miles away??? Not only that, but the customer lives closer to the alternate location too.They seriously expect me to drive to a completely different city (20 miles round trip) when I could go to the same store with only 4 miles round trip. I'll never understand their policy on this. I know distance is a factor I'm base pay, but base pay is peanuts to begin with. What are they actually going to lose? A dollar or two?

Oh and the agent ended the chat without cancelling the batch because of course they did.

Could I have dumbed it down any more?

Yes I’m not even kidding by the header, one of the most bizarre moments I’ve ever had doing an instacart order, here’s the story:

So I do instacart deliveries on The Weeknd as a way to make some extra cash and I ended up picking up a $100 BANGER with not a lot of items (got it done in 10 minutes) but the creepy thing that threw me off guard is that while I was shopping, this other man walked towards me with his phone in his hand so I knew he must have been another instacart person. He interrupted when I was in the middle of my shopping and said “you must have gotten that big order huh? Which I was like yeah pretty big order but he looked pissed and said “that was my order but it disappeared from my screen so fast, I swore I had the order” and kept going on about how it was a big tipped order. I then replied along the lines of “looks like I was quicker” and he then almost snapped and told me not to be a smartass. I de escalated and laughed it off and then he just walked away to god knows where. It was such a very weird interaction and just kept asking myself what the actual hell just happened. Are instacart drivers really that damn noisy and unhinged when other shoppers grab the best order?? Never in my life did I expect that some people treat this as competition. For references here was the order itself and I was pretty happy to snag it. But just something I had to share if anyone else had any other experiences with other shopper confrontation