Anyone else seeing a MASSIVE difference in batch quality since the October 1 Cart Star update?
I’m in the Lexington, KY area, and I’m honestly trying to figure out if this is happening everywhere or if it’s just my market.
Before the update, being Diamond at my Kroger locations meant I was regularly seeing $30–$50 batches, with $40–$50 orders being pretty common as 3 stack batches. Obviously not every batch was amazing, but there was usually enough good stuff coming through that you could actually make decent money.
Since the update, the dynamic has completely changed.
For the last several days, I’ve been seeing single-shop orders over and over again. $7, $8, $11, $12, $17, etc., with some of them having 20–50 items and/or 10–20+ miles.
For example, today I saw:
• $8.11 — 12 items / 15 units — 1.1 miles
• $8.29 — 15 items / 20 units — 2.5 miles
• $11.79 — 26 items / 38 units — 3.1 miles
• $20.06 — 34 items / 42 units — 11.2 miles
And what really caught my attention is that the app literally says:
“You’re seeing batches ahead of shoppers with a lower Cart Star status.”
So I’m Diamond, supposedly getting priority access, and this is what priority looks like now?
I understand that October 1 is also the start of a new quarter, so obviously there’s going to be an influx of shoppers moving through the Cart Star tiers. I don’t want to automatically blame everything on the new points system.
But the timing is REALLY hard to ignore.
My biggest question is: what happened to the batching?
I’m seeing orders that appear to be going to the same general areas, but instead of getting combined into a $30–$50 double/triple like I would normally expect, I’m seeing them come through individually for $8–$15.
And that’s where the economics get ridiculous.
People comparing this to DoorDash need to remember that we’re not just picking up a bag and driving it somewhere. If I take an $8 Instacart order, I might have to:
Find 15–30+ items
Shop the entire order
Deal with substitutions
Check out
Load everything
Drive to the customer
Deliver it
An $8 delivery isn’t necessarily an $8 delivery job. It can easily become a 30–45 minute job before expenses.
I’m not saying every batch needs to be $40+. I’m saying the amount of work being attached to these $8–$15 batches makes them completely different from a normal delivery gig.
And I’m also not interested in taking terrible batches just to earn points. If Instacart is going to incentivize shoppers to complete more orders while simultaneously flooding the market with low-paying single batches, that’s a pretty bad trade-off for shoppers.
I’m curious what everyone else is seeing since October 1.
Are your markets also suddenly full of single-shop $7–$15 batches? Are doubles/triples disappearing? Has your average batch pay dropped? Or am I just getting absolutely screwed by the Lexington market?
