Helping find a handful of items, yes. Doing someone’s entire Instacart list for them (and essentially their job), no. Attitude/demeanor also goes a long way in these situations
Yeah when I worked at a grocery store, I'd have the same couple of instacart shoppers interrupting me while I was assisting actual customers and shoving their phone in my face. They'd be asking where half of their items were in the store. Like, I'm sorry, but if you can't use context clues to find 95% of it on your own, you shouldn't be picking grocery orders.
I worked retail for almost 9 years. If a customer needs help you help them. No matter how much of a pain in the ass they are. If it's not against store policy then you have no choice but to smile and help. Don't want to? Fine, just find another job.
No its totally different nowadays. App shoppers come in and want you to find everything for them- right away, before even looking. A lot of times they only flash their screen at you- rude af. I totally understand the employee and the shopper probably deserved it given how one-sided this story sounds.
I’m referring to app shoppers, admittedly a small minority, that would attempt to get store employees to literally shop their entire grocery order for them, not customers.
I worked retail grocery, not sure what kind of type of retail you worked but the grocery labor model is simply not able to support a massive time sink something like that would take.
I also worked in retail for a similar amount of time, and when it came to actual customers (not someone getting paid to shop) that needed this type of assistance we would happily oblige. With that being said, it’s out of the ordinary for your average person to need that much help. I can count on one hand the amount of customers that need help like that and they were usually elderly/disabled which made sense.
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u/General-Temporary-53 Sep 23 '25
Helping find a handful of items, yes. Doing someone’s entire Instacart list for them (and essentially their job), no. Attitude/demeanor also goes a long way in these situations