It seems like the race to implement a quick and easy strategy for e-commerce has slowed down. Most retailers I know of have some kind of pickup or delivery and are now working out the kinks.
There are a few holdouts – Trader Joe’s, for example – but even The Fresh Market has now expanded Instacart to all 161 stores chain-wide.
Instacart has its flaws, and an increasingly dissatisfied – and vocal – workforce of shoppers. Brittain Ladd, a digital consultant, authored this piece for The Observer, and said he continues to receive communications not only from shoppers but also from customers venting their frustrations with Instacart.
I’ve been shopping online for observational (and convenience) purposes and have watched a few organizations grow and change over the years. E-commerce is still young in a lot of areas, including my own, but I can say with some confidence that I’m not sure gig workers are the way to go in the long run.
The Austin market was a testing grounds for Instacart, and several of my friends were shoppers for them on and off and they all dropped out, disillusioned, when they just weren’t taking home enough money to make it worth the hassle.
I follow a few local social media groups and whenever Instacart, or Favor, or Shipt, is brought up as a potential way to earn extra money, scores of former shoppers chime in with horror stories.
I did it again the next week and had the opportunity to chat with the gal who picked my groceries for me about her experience doing order fulfillment for the company. I don’t want to get her in trouble for talking to the media, so I’ll keep her name out of it, but she was awesome.
She talked about why Walmart’s different: the consistent pricing without markup, the training they receive for picking orders, her philosophy for picking fresh fruits and vegetables, and the fact that they use employees – not gig workers – to fulfill orders.
“They always told us to pick produce we’d buy for ourselves,” she told me.
Other key points:
- Walmart doesn’t allow for a customer to request specific ripeness, so she tends to choose stage 5 bananas and almost-ripe avocados;
- She has the hardest time with choosing mangoes because she’s not sure on how to select the ripeness a customer wants – customer preference is pretty subjective;
- She’s never had a complaint about the quality of produce she’s picked, and she was pretty proud of that.
My experience with gig workers, with Shipt, Favor and Instacart, was not anything like this. I got a friendly smile and bags of groceries, but no customization, no conversation, and, frankly, an unreasonable number of errors.
I don’t know what it says about my expectations for Walmart versus regional grocers that I’ve been pleasantly surprised by these experiences, but I definitely think it says something about gig workers vs. employees.
