the Instacart Problem

[adrian_turtle]

Instacart exploits their drivers. They don't pay them nearly enough. (Buying them safety equipment would cost the company money, so the company doesn't do it for exactly the same reasons they pay so little.) And Instacart has a lot of customers who don't have much money, but need their groceries delivered.

If Instacart charged more for delivery, some of their customers would look at the total cost and decide to go to the store themselves. In February? Yeah, sure. Now? in addition to all the people who didn't go in February because of inconvenience or disabilities or transportation problems, there are a lot of people who should stay out of stores now as a matter of public health. Even when we relax the quarantine to the point of only isolating medically vulnerable people and those who might possibly be sick...that's quite a few people. Many of them elderly, disabled, single parents, and/or unemployed, and thus short of funds.


Sometimes it staggers me, how lucky I was to have so many offers of help when I got sick. And sometimes I worry about exhausting those reservoirs of good will from people who are helping me when I can't help them in return. (And don't see how I can help them in the forseeable future.) It's so hard to ask for help. It gets harder to ask when I don't exactly need help, when I can manage on my own but maybe not manage all that well. I haven't seen any hint of fragility in my own safety net, but I still can't quite believe it would hold up if I had to use it long term. It ran for weeks on people's desire to feel helpful and charitable, but it can't possibly run for years, can it? Or would that curdle into resentment and we'd have to change over to running on cupcakes?

I was looking into Michigan grocery delivery, because my 79-year-old mother lives in Michigan. She thinks the virus isn't really dangerous and doesn't want to waste a lot of money on delivery services when she can just go to the store herself. (And not wear a mask. And complain bitterly when store employees try to enforce distancing.) An organization called "Umbrella" says "In response to the coronavirus outbreak, we are arranging no-contact deliveries of essentials for adults 60+ nationwide. It's easy and affordable, supported by an amazing network of volunteers and workers." My mother doesn't know any neighbors at all, so these nice people will find her one who is in good health and eager to help for only...Wait. They want my mom to pay $10 for the delivery, which is not very much to save more than an hour and some risk. The trick is that the money all goes to the corporation, because the driver is a volunteer. Is this really a good solution to the problem of worker exploitation?

Comments

[anne]

I don't think I understand. Is Umbrella run by Instacart?

But while I agree that Instacart is awful, the important thing right now is keeping your mother safe. Get her through the next six months and then reassess.

[adrian_turtle]

Umbrella is not run by Instacart. They are a different company, trying to solve the same problem. (Last time I checked, Instacart did not operate in her area.) That got me thinking about the more general problem. Oddly, it did not occur to me that the owners of Instacart might skim off less profit...I have no idea if it's a profitable business for owners, or if they would need to charge higher delivery fees for ANYBODY to make money. Are they like a grocery store, where all the profit margins are really small? Or more like Amazon, which is raking in the money?

[siderea]

If we lived in a sane society, one of the first things that would have happened is that the President of the USA would have called the CEO of Instacart, the leaders of both parties in the House and the Senate, and the head of the NIH into the Oval Office and announced, "It is of utmost importance for reasons of national security to keep as many people as possible out of grocery stores. Let us figure out how much of this problem Instacart could solve for us, provided enough resources, and what it would take to keep their delivery people safe, and how big a check the Federal government needs to write to Instacart for them to make this happen for us."

In Wuhan, where gated hi-rise apartment complexes are common, I gather it was a thing that the management companies of apartment complexes were tasked with collecting the grocery orders of everyone in the complex who wanted groceries, and arranging to have them delivered all at once, like once a week. Payment through WeChat (IIRC), and each resident called down one at a time to get their delivery off the back of the truck.

I live in an apartment building that holds something like 100 people. We are all getting our groceries as separate households. This is incredibly wasteful and inefficient. Imagine if there were a way to batch Peapod deliveries, and they could send a whole truck with just the grocery orders for this one building. It would save a truly vast amount of driving, and consequently make it possible for them to serve (barring other bottlenecks) vastly more people with the same number of delivery drivers!

But there's no infrastructure to do that, and no will to develop that infrastructure. If the government had asked Peapod to arrange such a thing, particularly for the supportive housing apartment buildings for the disabled and elderly, but possibly even for all large apartment blocks, they might well have done it, especially if subsidized even a little. It could have gone a huge ways to keeping people out of groceries stores in the urban cores where the infection has been worst. It possibly even could be done without much backend infrastructure, just a building-specific "coupon code" that tells the system which building you're in and automatically schedules your order onto that truck, and the building/delivery schedule wrangled by hand with a special phone number only shared with building coordinators (whether prop managers, landlords, supers, or designated tenants) going to reserved CSAs.

We never even meaningfully tried to solve the problem of "How do we make it possible for people to keep out of the grocery stores? Particularly people that are exposed by presymptomatic, or mildly symptomatic, who aren't terribly motivated to submit to quarantine?"

[adrian_turtle]

The scenario you describe as obvious for a sane society is something I can't imagine a president doing. It's not just that it's so wildly out of character for Trump. I can't imagine Obama or Clinton or Reagan doing it either. (Maybe Nixon. The world has changed a lot since Nixon.)

We never even meaningfully tried to solve the problem of "How do we make it possible for people to keep out of the grocery stores? Particularly people that are exposed by presymptomatic, or mildly symptomatic, who aren't terribly motivated to submit to quarantine?"

In New York, back in March when the US epidemic was just starting. Thinking a whole community had been exposed the governor closed local schools, advised people not to go more than a mile from home, sent in the national guard to distribute food. I recall the response being something like "How dare he impose martial law!" Paying private enterprise solves that problem.

[siderea]

Also,

While I agree that Instacart doesn't pay their people enough and has done nothing to equip them with PPE, and the following isn't a solution to the systemic problem, Instacart lets you tip whatever you want, and the simple response to feeling one's delivery drivers aren't being paid enough is to pay them more oneself, if one has the means.

I tip outrageously in money, and also in masks. I figure: I need to not just pay what the service deserves, but enough beyond that to also make up for what somebody else pays who can't afford to pay what the service deserves. And if I want delivery drivers in PPE, I should get them PPE.

[elusiveat]

I love this solution. And accompanying PPE with a hefty tip seems like a pretty good assurance that the offer of PPE won't be treated as an insult.

Not that that helps Adrian_Turtle much, as offering PPE requires being there in person it doesn't sound like her mother is someone who will have any interest in making this kind of thing happen : \

[adrian_turtle]

I thought I could talk her into it, but it turns out I can't. The core problem is that she wants things to be normal.

[elusiveat]

Makes sense. This does seem to be a big sticking point for lots of people...

[amaebi]

Man, that's hard.

[redbird]

This doesn't address the general case, but one option around here (which I haven't used yet) would be to get help either from a high school student -- Belmont HS has arranged this, and Arlington likely has too. There's also a "Belmont helps" group where people are offering to grocery-shop for people who can't or shouldn't do their own shopping.

Also, right now while you're still recuperating is exactly when you should be asking for, and accepting, help.

Neither genuine volunteers nor Instacart solves the problem of people, who might include your mother, who want to do their own grocery shopping because it gets them out of the house and so many other places they might go are closed now. (One helpful stranger told me that doing our grocery shopping was the first time she'd been out in a week and a half, and she was glad of the opportunity.)

[pameladean]

I do use Instacart and, as described above, tip outrageously. Also, while it is possible that they are lying in their teeth, Instacart sent out an email a week or two ago proudly, if tardily, proclaiming that they were providing (Free of charge!) "shopping kits" to their shoppers, with gloves, masks, and hand sanitizer. So it was very late, but if this is true they are now providing a modicum of protection.

P.

[adrian_turtle]

I wonder if this is a local or regional thing? I used Instacart this winter, so I'd expect them to send me that kind of email. I filled and abandoned a shopping cart there in quite recently, so I'd really expect them to send me anything that would make them look ethical or safe.

[firecat]

I gather Instacart started providing free PPE after a one-day strike by their workers.

[pameladean]

I would certainly expect them to do that as well.

I did a very quick search and sadly, it looks as if Instacart keeps saying it will provide these things and in some cases (maybe some locations? it's unclear) actually did so until they ran out of some or all items; but they seemed incapable of starting up again, at least in the short run.

It's a pretty poor showing.

P.

[firecat]

It gets harder to ask when I don't exactly need help, when I can manage on my own but maybe not manage all that well. So true.

[silveradept]

I suspect the actual answer to these questions are things like "these services can only exist because they exploit their workers in ways that would be criminal in any society that cared about anything but capital," and so fixing the problem of exploiting drivers would be the kind of thing that would crush Uber and Doordash along with Instacart.

I have no practical immediate solutions, and can only hope that whatever option works, it's the least exploitative of the lot.

[landofnowhere]

I'd heard of Umbrella through my mother, but had no idea that was their business model. :O

(Assuming this is stil a problem you are trying to solve: does she have a Kroger in her area that offers curbside pickup? I understand they're currently waiving the fee.)

[adrian_turtle]

It turns out that my mother has other issues that curbside pickup nor Umbrella nor Instacart can solve. She does not believe she is in any real danger from the coronavirus*, and it's important to her to pick out her own bananas.


*She thinks the dangers of COVID are wildly exaggerated, and the only people in significant danger are in prisons or nursing homes.

[landofnowhere]

I'm sorry :-(

[amaebi]

The good solutions to the problem of worker exploitation are of course structural.

I not only like to choose my own produce, but don't want to use any of those delivery services, because they exploit their workers. But I am of course not helping out workers wen I don't use the service, because I am thus neither tipping them nor adding to demand for their services.

My dilemma is vastly preferable to yours, of course.

[adrian_turtle]

The good solutions to the problem of worker exploitation are of course structural.

This is what I was trying to say, far more efficiently than I could say it. Thank you.