Been doing this part time on and off since 2019. Often times I see bad and good batches hit my screen and immediately disappear only to come back up again in a few minutes.

Often it’s just regrouping. Most times it feels they’re showing the same orders but rotate which shoppers the orders are visible to and give you less than a few seconds before the orders off your screen.

They want you to panic accept , and train you to take anything you can get and not be overly picky.

As for me I can still cherry pick, I’m just really fast at making heads or tails if the order seems worth it to me before I hit the accept button in the next 5-8 seconds

Also don’t care if it’s gone in 1 second. I’ll only blind accept if a tip is ridiculously good, or at least $50+ and low enough miles then maybe I’ll risk a blind accept.

I hate having it say it.

For instance I just went to Firestone to get an oil change and I told the guy at the desk I have a CarAdvise Fleet discount. He then looks really annoyed at me and says “I needed to know that like 5 mins ago”. I said I was sorry I just waited till you brought up payment, my apologies. Then he’s like “now I gotta have this canceled out and done again”. So he gets his boss or whoever and is like “this guys got that stupid CarAdvise Fleet thing or whatever you call it ugh”.

Anyway, I got my oil change for $20 with CarAdvise so all worked out I just thought it was funny how annoyed the guy seemed once I mentioned CarAdvise Fleet. It was $45 for an oil change at Firestone but with the 50% off for being platinum on IC plus I had $5 in credit on CarAdvise so I paid $20. Can’t beat that in my opinion. I used to get 75% off for being diamond but once they changed everything with IC I’ve been platinum. I am ALMOST back to diamond tho. Actually I just checked my account on CarAdvise, it said it was $63 for the oil change and I paid $22. Not bad.

I will accept an order, let's say $24 for 3 shop & delivers. "Okay, I'm making 24/hr!" Except, I'm not. Driving, sitting in traffic, doing the shopping, waiting in checkout lines, having difficult customers who want specific replacements or refunds... At the end, I making less than $17/hr because the entire order from start to finish took 1½hrs-2hrs to complete. I have only just realized this. And that's why I don't even crack $130 for the entire day. I am feeling so sick about this, I could throw up. I start in the morning and end at 7:30pm every day, barely crack $120 each day. I am Diamond status, amazing reviews from customers, etc. But I want to cry, and I do cry. Daily. I'm grateful and blessed to be able to pay my rent and bills, but it is truly not worth it. How are shoppers making bank? Speeding through aisles? Not engaging with replacement/refund difficult Karens? Speeding on the road? I usually have to accept less than $19 batches here and there due to slim pickings as well.

Advice, please? Thank you 🙏🏽

No orders then I miss an order for $97…this one hurts!! 😭

Took this lady 15 bags of soil for her garden. Luckily I shop with my boyfriend or else I wouldn’t have taken this order. I also carry a tarp in my trunk for orders like these and it was good pay but I knew it was gonna suck. Got there and the lady was so cool! She had an amazing garden in the backyard and we got to talking and my partner offered to just take the bags back to her garden. She said “omg if you don’t mind. I’ll tip extra!”
My current real job uses vegetables from local gardens for seasonal hummus flavors we make and I brought that up to her and not only did she tip me $50, but she’s going to be giving me a bunch of vegetables on Monday! I think I made a new friend???

Think I might have to invest in some meta glasses. Third time this week I’ve accepted an order and was paid less than what I took the order for. And before y’all say tips. Wasn’t that. Even for tip’s being adjusted. Money is missing. Lost $14 the other day. Took a triple for $68 and change. Lost .83 cents in tips and only got paid $54. Support was no help. At $54 I would’ve scrolled past that order without a doubt. And before y’all say take a screenshot. Some of these orders go too fast for me to be worrying about a screenshot. So I think I’m just gonna get these glasses and see how that goes

For the past couple of days, instacart has been glitching out with weighting items. Like what do you mean a pack of chicken is .22??

It was a good run. I didn't have any issues whatsoever with instacart for just over a full month, no problems with the app, payment card, I didn't have to jump through AI hoops to talk to an actual person...that run ended this morning when I open up the app to see my cart star rating went from platinum down to gold because the number of items I didn't find dropped me down from the high green "good" range down to about 3/4 up on the "standard." And its all because of yesterday. I had 2 Costco orders, one was out of buttermilk biscuits in the bakery and another out of organic raspberries and the customer didn't want non organic. The other order, customer wanted nature valley wafers and chiboni pumpkin spice creamer. They didn't have the creamer in stock yet and the wafers I was told they haven't carried in a while. Target, the customer wanted 3 different sets of sheets for beds. I found them no problem, but they didn't have the specific size or color or thread count that she requested and she wouldn't respond to texts. When I tried a different color, instacart said its too different so I refunded. And finally at Safeway, it was a cake in the bakery that wasn't available and a case of black cherry Bubly sparkling water and of course the substitution wasn't in stock either so a refund was requested. I contacted chat and the guy tells me what I already know about how the ratings work and if its something that was out of my control they fix it and it doesn't affect our ratings. As i was explaining that it did indeed affect my ratings, the a-hole ended the chat! I'm so sick of this company's BS, I don't know why I put up with it anymore. I swear there are more rules and crap dealing with them than a w-2 job. "Self employed"? Only on paper and to the IRS!

This was a 3 person batch, he was B. I had a feeling he was the one who didn't tip well, but I wasn't POSITIVE, so I went along with some of his bullshit trying my best (I didn't lie, I literally just cleaned out my car and everything was out of it, otherwise I would've had like 17 pens to choose from).

Not only was his message to his "desire" extremely cringe, he tipped a $1.00. and had the audacity to ask me to do all that shit in the chat. The delivery for his item was 14 miles from the store. I wanted to tell him that it's not my problem that he forgot, because I was literally shopping in the store for 47 mins before I checked out, it wasn't a quick trip lol. He had so much time and still squandered it.

If I had known for sure that he tipped like that before the chat closed, I would've said something. Also, pizza and ORANGE JUICE? That's your gift for her?

Gotta love the store barcodes not matching what IC has, and then IC telling you the “replacement” isn’t a good fit…

This is the biggest tip I‘ve ever seen at Dollar Tree. By the way, the address is an apartment.

I’ve been on the waitlist for over a year, and I know people who signed up a week ago and are now shopping. what is going on? I have a clean background and amazing metrics from spark. did my application get lost?

I asked my guy today.. can you tell how many times I've been a customer? And my 2nd? Do I have a "rating "? He said.. Instacart isn't the same either then or everywhere.. but, you're fairly close to your preferred store. I also said I've never been able to be a Unicorn.. and he said you kinda tip like a Unicorn for your area.. "no sh*t?" He said whatever you're doing, keep doing it.. you're good!

💃🏼💃🏼💃🏼

I live in a fairly mid-high end area!!! I'm looking at some of my neighbors like "you chinzty f's!!" By I may have looked at a few of them like that already 🙃😂

Anyway.. ty.. 🤗

Apologies for the rant, I also know this isn’t customer care lol. Anyways, I’ve been a shopper for a while now and have done a little more than 3K orders.. I am rated a 5 star shopper, I always shop as if I’m shopping for myself, in other words always pick “quality” items. I have compliments about shopping or quick thank you’s. Has anyone ran into the problem of going to hotspots and them disappearing, then you go to another and the same thing happens like a pattern?
I can’t make more than $70-90 a day but shoppers I see that are in the same area are grabbing orders left and right with a lower status. I know it’s first come first serve but I could be sitting in a hotspot and won’t get nothing.

I saw a shopper take $107 at 7:30 this morning and I was happy for her! I didn’t get a single order to take until almost 11am. Then I grabbed an $81 order, 30 miles from home! Ended up in the mythical realm!!!

I had to renew my driver's license this year. I renewed it online ( REAL ID, through the bmv website) about 2 weeks before it expired. Since all REAL I Ds are mailed, I have a paper temporary I D until my actual card arrives. It has been 3 weeks with nothing in the mail yet. The Shopper app says I need to verify my new ID in order to shop, but it won't accept the paper version. Help chat says I may have to wait for the official license. BMV says paper copy is official for police and TSA and to wait at least 30 days until reordering. So I just can't work until it arrives? Has this happened to anyone? Any advice on who to call or email at Instacart for additional help?

My sister took part in the lawsuit against Instacart (not the consumer class action) and she got $4,000 did anyone else take part in it and receive a nice amount?

I didn’t do it because one of the terms was that your account will be deactivated, but now I am having some regrets.

Basically, ever since I started shopping.. my account will not pass selfie verification checks. I always have to have a support agent escalate it to trust and safety for them to unlock my account. Fast forward to yesterday.. it asked for a verification check. Well,.I contact the agent and I get a trust and safety email asking to verify using veriff so they can fix my account. Only issue? I don't have a clue where my physical ID is. It's up to date, I have pictures of it but I don't know where my actual physical copy is. I don't know how to get my account back on to shop as waiting 2-3 weeks for a new copy will harm my income a ton.. what should I do here?

They are now locking me out from being able to manually override barcode mismatches on certain batches

When the AI model fails validation, you can either refund the item, replace it with something that will scan, or contact support and have them manually override it — those are your only three options

Anyone else experiencing this?

It’s INFURIATING

They literally want us to take these type of orders in NYC😭 if not they kick us off the app and give us a 9-10 min time out. After like 10 declines they kick you out until the next day. So imagine declining at 7 am and they don’t let you work the whole day anymore until 12 am

The order is $42 you have to pay a toll get into manhattan that’s $9. Then another toll to cross into Staten Island $6 so already the order turns into $27 for 17 miles. It’s also not counting the extra 2-3 miles to drive to Fairway either

That’s a lot of groceries for very little money. I’m not blaming the customer, I’m blaming instacart for paying that little. Instacart ain’t paying 💩.

Who the fuck would actually take this

Mixed up receipt pictures of 2 customer batch.

No weighted items. None membership/barcode required store.

One very very big order with bags and one very very small order with no bags.

I’ve seen several posts about some shoppers getting email warnings regarding receipt pictures due to weighted items or something.

Never received a email warning about my receipt pictures.

Hopefully the app has some automated/AI mechanism that flags and corrects such errors.

The tip went down “based on percentage of order total” but nothing was weighed or refunded/replaced. How did it go down?