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I recently started playing competitive pinball- yes, it's a thing- and wanted to supplement the business I've been running since 2014 as it provides a living, but does not allow for purchasing an extravagance like a $6,000, new-in-box Deadpool with a shaker motor to practice on at home. So, I started driving Instacart to supplement my business, which is slow this time of year, and just finished up my first month. Here are my impressions, tips, etc.- feel free to ask questions below or to correct me or add to this if you've been doing it longer. I decided to do this only after we had a 2015 Ford Focus with 92 thousand miles on it basically get gifted to us for the princely sum of 2 years' worth of payments at $180 a month to the original owner who moved out of state and was upside down on her loan. I would not recommend doing Insta in a good/nice/gas guzzling car because you will be putting a lot of wear and tear on the brakes and tires and spending a lot on fuel- which at least here in CA- is expensive (over 4 bucks now, everywhere but Arco). You’re also subjecting your car to an above- average amount of parking lot dings and will be running the A/C nearly constantly. I've seen people doing Insta in a Suburban but it doesn't make sense to me, you need something small and gas efficient. I get about 27 miles to the gallon in my little car, about 23 when I drive for Insta. I put nearly 5k miles on the car last month doing Insta in and around Orange County, CA. First off, there are two ways to do Insta, as referred to in the thread title- you can pick up 'batches' just by turning on the app and looking at orders, or you can pick up Hours, which lock you in to a specific time frame that you're willing to take and deliver orders. Doing batches is how everyone thinks Insta is before they do it- 'I'll just do it for an hour on the way home and make forty or fifty bucks!'- that's not how it works, though. When you're out 'batching', unless you know the area really well, it's easy to take one delivery in one place and then drive 20 miles to get the next one. When you're on Hours, the algorithm makes it a point to try to limit the time you have between orders since when you are driving without groceries in the car you aren't making any money. Picking up hours comes with the expectation that you will work the hours you said you'd work- if you cancel them within 6 hours of your shift you'll get a 'reliability incident'. 5 of those, and Insta will only allow you to pick up hours the day before a shift, whereas as it is now I can pick up hours more than a week out. Sunday and Monday are the busiest days by far. It takes, on average, about 55 minutes to run a batch. This is an average of everything from a 600 dollar, 2 hour order at Smart and Final, to a 1 item stop at Total Wine and More. DO NOT TRY TO GO FAST. You will get flustered, you will end up making twenty redundant trips back and forth through the store, you will get frustrated and angry at all the olds meandering around- you just have to sort of go with the flow, especially at 2 PM on a Sunday Costco run. The app attempts to give you the fastest route through the store but it’s almost always wrong- except at Ralph’s- and recommends dumb poo poo like getting all the produce first. Your first few orders, you are going to struggle and it’s going to suck and you’re going to ask yourself why you are doing this. See, grocery shopping for a lot of people is kind of fun- you enter the store and languidly stroll through the brightly colored aisles, dropping whatever tickles your fancy in to the cart. It’s very, very different when you are essentially doing an automaton’s job. You have to scan a barcode for every item on the list, you have to enter weights for meat and produce- it’s not what you’re thinking of when you think of grocery shopping. The third time you scan an incorrect barcode because they wanted Super Premium Lactose Free with Added B12, not Super Premium Lactose Free with Added B14 it’s gonna piss you off and you’re gonna notice that you’re tired and sore and hey, this sorta sucks. I know it sounds trivial but limit how many times you reach for and scan things. Don’t pick something up off the shelf if you’re not sure it’s the right item- sure, once is no big deal but if you do 12 orders in a day at an average of twenty items all that extra motion is going to add up. The job is hard on your wrists and arms, too, I had horrible spasms in my left forearm for days after I started, from steering the cart with one arm and holding the phone in the other. I’m not just complaining, the job hurts. You’ve seen those guys on Deadliest Catch that get Crab Hand? Well, Grocery Hand is a real thing too. I haven’t driven since Monday and my hands hurt like a bitch as I type this. Now, what I’m sure everyone wants to know- how does it pay? I kept a spreadsheet because I’m a dork like that. Here are the results- bear in mind that I worked like a maniac- 7 hours a day on average for 26 days last month- because I want this to be over with and to get my drat pinball. Everyone asks ‘will you keep doing this after you get your pinball?’ To which the answer is a resounding ‘hell no’.  You can see that yes, it looks like Insta pays close to $17 an hour. What you haven’t been told, though, is that those figures don’t include fuel cost which I estimate to be 20% of what I’ve earned (I haven’t kept good track but I think this is pretty close). This brings the rate of pay down to around $13.10 an hour, not including the poo poo you are beating out of your car and your body, and the fact that most people don’t realize that independent contractors are supposed to pay taxes quarterly- you’re down somewhere around $11.10 an hour at a 15% tax rate. And then you realize you have a Master’s Degree that you paid 75 grand for and now you want to kill yourself because murdering your car and body is still paying less than the starting wage at McDonald's. The one real nice thing about Insta is that Insta pays around 70% of the cost of a run and the customer pays around 30% with their ‘tip’. Up to 5 times a day, you can pay 50 cents to withdraw any money Insta owes you instantly. The tips are paid weekly with an account deposit. So if you absolutely need $50 to cover a bill today, you can probably log in to Insta and get that $50- but don’t forget the cost of that money, in terms of your car, the gas, your body and time, etc. Some general tips: Work alone. I see ‘teams’ of people working together- some of them even with an infant in a car carrier in the cart- ewwwwwwwwwwww, unsanitary- but I have no idea how it’s faster or more efficient. You still have to scan every single bar code and everything is tied to one phone. Don't hurry. You will piss off the people in the store, you will bang poo poo up, you will hurt yourself on the cart. Don’t plod, and you can hustle- but don’t hurry. I’ve timed it and going as fast as you can versus slowing down a little and not wasting trips across the store/energy doesn’t save time. It’s like when the Mythbusters tested driving with the flow of traffic vs. driving like a maniac- the time it saves is negligible at best. Dehumanize yourself and face to bloodshed if you have to go in to a Costco. I swear that people’s IQs drop 40 points in the presence of that store. Don’t try to rush it. Go with the flow. Also a $3 chicken bake is a great in between runs meal. People are lovely and can edit tips so that they’ll dangle a $10 tip and then take it back once you’ve delivered. This is a gigantic problem and it’s getting a lot worse lately, as well. Spending 2 hours at Costco and making $17 because they didn’t tip is a really demoralizing thing to have happen. It also sucks when you got the best of the lovely 4 cauliflower that were left at 9 PM on a Sunday and the customer gives you one star because of 'damaged goods' even though the app strongly encourages you to bring everything the customer ordered whether it looks good or not. Sure, you can call them- but you're going to gently caress up your performance metrics while Sally Housewife runs you around the store for the 5 things she forgot to order but still wants you to get. A 5 star rating on a batch pays an extra $3 but it seems pretty random as to when you get no rating and when you get 5 stars. I do have to say that Insta are fair about if you did the job or didn't and let you keep cancelled/undeliverable orders and pay you for orders that are unfulfillable. I’m still eating $200 worth of organic chicken from Mother’s Market that was ordered to a nonexistent address last week. Feel free to ask questions! Sorry, this got long 
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Oct 2, 2019 18:02
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How much do you make playing pinball?
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Oct 4, 2019 20:43
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It sounds like at this point you are effectively working a full-time job with Insta-Cart. The job sounds miserable and, well, not particularly remunerative, even before the additional payroll taxes for being a "contractor" are considered Why not get a "real" job (either salaried or hourly) elsewhere?
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Oct 4, 2019 20:52
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EAT FASTER!!!!!! posted:How much do you make playing pinball? I also play competitive pinball in one of the more active regions of the US. We run three seasons a year and finishing #1 in your division earns you $250. If you play in big tournaments, you can maybe win a hundred bucks if you finish on top, but I have played for two years, routinely finish top-50 out of ~400, and have made less than a hundred bucks overall so far. For context though, Pinburgh (the world's largest pinball tournament) paid $15,000 to the winner of A Division, $4,000 to the winner of B Division, $2,000 to the winner of C Division, and less than that for the remaining two divisions. .
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Oct 4, 2019 20:59
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Tiny Tubesteak Tom posted:I also play competitive pinball in one of the more active regions of the US. We run three seasons a year and finishing #1 in your division earns you $250. If you play in big tournaments, you can maybe win a hundred bucks if you finish on top, but I have played for two years, routinely finish top-50 out of ~400, and have made less than a hundred bucks overall so far. So long story short, the break-even on purchasing this $6,000 piece of equipment is roughly an infinite number years unless he's going to win Pittsburgh in the A division?
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Oct 4, 2019 21:08
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If you're in CA, shouldn't it be pretty easy to make $17/hr without putting an assload of miles on your car? Also you gotta withhold for taxes or you'll be hosed come tax time.
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Oct 4, 2019 21:24
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EAT FASTER!!!!!! posted:So long story short, the break-even on purchasing this $6,000 piece of equipment is roughly an infinite number years unless he's going to win Pittsburgh in the A division? The break-even on a new in box pinball machine is literally non-existent. For a good, and even a great player, there is virtually zero profitability until you hit world class levels. Oh, and a NiB pin will almost certainly break less than six months in and then you are on the hook for the costs of parts, and that's assuming you already have the know-how to fix it yourself. Pinburgh is 1000 of the world's absolute best players competing for a weekend. I played this year and finished somewhere in the 400s, and just crossing the 50th percentile is an achievement. Odds of winning the pot? Infinitely small for someone who doesn't already own an entire arcade's worth of games to practice on. OP, you don't need a brand new Deadpool to loving practice. If you can play locally competitively, you can go take $20 down on location and play for five hours. That removes the money pit of a broken machine from the equation entirely. I think you are understating the maintenance on a Stern. Even fresh from the factory Jurassic Parks have systematic mechanical issues. barnold fucked around with this message at 22:06 on Oct 4, 2019 |
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Oct 4, 2019 22:00
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Can't you charge people 25 cents to play it? 24,000 suckers and it is paid off.
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Oct 5, 2019 00:53
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EAT FASTER!!!!!! posted:How much do you make playing pinball? i dunno, like..two hundred bucks over the last 6 months? playing pinball for a living is not in the cards except for maybe a dozen people in the world Vox Nihili posted:It sounds like at this point you are effectively working a full-time job with Insta-Cart. The job sounds miserable and, well, not particularly remunerative, even before the additional payroll taxes for being a "contractor" are considered i still have my business to run for 4-6 hours a day and i put in a gently caress load of hours volunteering with youth soccer as well. the ability to pick up and put down the app and choose hours is like...99% of the appeal of it. i already pay taxes quarterly on my own business so i am well aware of that particualr trap. My Rhythmic Crotch posted:If you're in CA, shouldn't it be pretty easy to make $17/hr without putting an assload of miles on your car? please show me where. a job overnight slinging packages at UPS or stocing shelves at Target pays about $14 an hour and i can't do those anyway as i can't technically technically lift more than 25 pounds. don't get me wrong, the money is lovely. i am effectively trading the wear on my body and car and my time for something i don't really have the means to get normally and i accept that. Tiny Tubesteak Tom posted:OP, you don't need a brand new Deadpool to loving practice. If you can play locally competitively, you can go take $20 down on location and play for five hours. That removes the money pit of a broken machine from the equation entirely. I think you are understating the maintenance on a Stern. Even fresh from the factory Jurassic Parks have systematic mechanical issues. i want it, i don't need it. i play pinball 3 or 4 times a week anyway. i want it at home to share with my family and friends and to be the first of probably fifty i plan to eventually own Elephanthead posted:Can't you charge people 25 cents to play it? 24,000 suckers and it is paid off. i don't know a single operator that makes money operating pinballs
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Oct 5, 2019 01:08
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Since you have a master's degree, you might consider tutoring, particularly if you're near a wealthy enclave of some sort. Pay is variable but even the most basic work would be around $25/hour. Heck, even waiting tables (in CA you get the full minimum wage PLUS tips) beats the hell out of what you're doing now. They always need folks who can do weekend hours. If you live near a major CA city there should be a ton of demand for part-time service employees.
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Oct 5, 2019 02:09
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i appreciate all the advice folks 
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Oct 5, 2019 03:42
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That's a cool write up. It sorta confirms my second hand knowledge of gig economy which is "it's only worthwhile if complete schedule autonomy with little notice is required". I'm glad you appear to be ditching it and you getting a Deadpool pro or premium for $6k?
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Oct 5, 2019 05:05
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Lockback posted:That's a cool write up. It sorta confirms my second hand knowledge of gig economy which is "it's only worthwhile if complete schedule autonomy with little notice is required". I'm glad you appear to be ditching it and you getting a Deadpool pro or premium for $6k? thanks; this ended up being more about pinball than anything but i couldn't really find anything good to read about what it's like to do the job before i started and i get asked a lot. i refuse to read reddit I'm gonna do it off and on until my birthday, super bowl weekend in february. im more than halfway there already; it'd be stupid to stop now. as i mentioned though, i absolutely will not keep doing it once my clients' budgets for next year kick in  (it's a pro, the premium adds a shot i hate. im gonna spend the extra few hundo for the shaker, though, i think it adds a lot) edit: also you dont play pinball for money, you play it for badass trophies such as these:   
boar guy fucked around with this message at 05:43 on Oct 5, 2019 |
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Oct 5, 2019 05:20
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You have great taste in affordable whiskey, if nothing else!
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Oct 5, 2019 06:10
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Vox Nihili posted:You have great taste in affordable whiskey, if nothing else! thanks! I like the good stuff too but finding an inexpensive bottle that also tastes good is just as much fun
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Oct 5, 2019 15:05
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nothing like watching a 70 year old in a lifted avalanche who is not going to make it in to that primo parking space scrape up against your car in the costco parking lot as you yell at the top of your lungs you're going to hit my car, you're going to hit my car, you're hitting my car, you're hitting my car, you hit my car, what the hell man you hit my car then he gets out and asks you 'did i hit your car?' costco 
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Oct 8, 2019 17:02
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To achieve true greatness with money, take the money from the insurance claim and put it towards the pinball machine.
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Oct 8, 2019 20:49
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How much trouble do you get in if you give the receipt from the store with the order? My wife and I used Instacart once for shopping from Aldi. Most of the prices we saw on the app seemed familiar to what we saw in store so we never thought twice about it. At first it was a pretty cool experience with the guy texting us while he was in the store for exceptions and stuff. The delivery guy left the receipt with the delivery. We compared that receipt to what we paid through the app and most of the stuff on the app was 20 - 30% more expensive than what we the delivery guy actually paid for it. So not only did we pay the delivery/service fee and tip the driver, we also paid an extra ~25% for the items themselves. I guess this is just margin for Instacart. Called and complained. They offered us a $15 coupon, which I refused since I will never use Instacart (or any other of these delivery apps..Uber Eats, Postmates etc.) ever again.
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Oct 9, 2019 18:11
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Sock The Great posted:How much trouble do you get in if you give the receipt from the store with the order? I put the receipt in one of the bags for like the first...200 orders? Then I got a very terse email that you're not supposed to do that and now even if the customer asks me for it I tell them no, sorry, can't do it but yeah, part of Instacart's deal is that they negotiate volume discounts and such for produce, meat, etc.- so what you pay when you shop insta is not what you pay when you shop in the store. for example, cat food might be 2 for 1 in the store but not through insta and you are in no way supposed to get two bags of it for the client if you happen to see the deal in store. i see people texting their customers stuff like 'they have the Cheerios you wanted two for one, do you want to get two instead?' and im like what in the gently caress are you- and people that put thank you cards in the bags- doing i have a 4.93 rating and i never do any of that poo poo. AT MOST i will call you if the app says to, if i have to substitute something. im not leaving a voicemail and waiting 10 minutes for a call back, though Sock The Great posted:..... I will never use Instacart (or any other of these delivery apps..Uber Eats, Postmates etc.) ever again. can i ask why? it's pretty clear on their site what you're in for: Item pricing Retailers set the prices of items available for delivery on the Instacart platform. While many retailers offer the same in-store prices on Instacart, others set different prices on the Instacart platform than in-store prices. In some cases, a flat percentage is added to cover the cost of the Instacart service. boar guy fucked around with this message at 00:06 on Oct 10, 2019 |
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Oct 9, 2019 23:19
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boar guy posted:The job is hard on your wrists and arms, too, I had horrible spasms in my left forearm for days after I started, from steering the cart with one arm and holding the phone in the other. I’m not just complaining, the job hurts. You’ve seen those guys on Deadliest Catch that get Crab Hand? Well, Grocery Hand is a real thing too. I haven’t driven since Monday and my hands hurt like a bitch as I type this. This sounds like the setup for a sad short story where at the end your hands are too hosed up to play your new pinball machine. Are you worried about long term damage?
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Oct 10, 2019 00:24
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Inept posted:This sounds like the setup for a sad short story where at the end your hands are too hosed up to play your new pinball machine. Are you worried about long term damage? yes, frankly, I am. it's gotten better over time and I've learned better ways to hold the phone and things but between picking, pushing, scanning, lifting, carrying and driving I could see someone developing carpal tunnel or arthritis easily in a short period of time. some stores have little phone holders on the carts but ew think about the motion your wrist uses to rotate a can of corn so the bar code is in the right position for a phone to read it and then multiply that by a few hundred a day...then add in lifting heavy cases of water (4 times per order, mainly- in to cart, on to checkstand, in to car, up to door) hanging 6 bags off your fingers to save a trip up the stairs, driving with one hand....it adds up. I type like 150 WPM and thought I had muscular hands but nah
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Oct 10, 2019 14:31
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boar guy posted:yes, frankly, I am. Then why not stop doing it if the money is just for a hobby?
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Oct 10, 2019 17:11
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Also, NIB pins are nice and all, but you could save yourself a shitload of driving by "settling" for a mid 90's title. Seen dozens of pins from that era that are perfectly nice for any kind of practice.
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Oct 10, 2019 18:34
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Inept posted:Then why not stop doing it if the money is just for a hobby? its just a few months
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Oct 10, 2019 21:57
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Can’t win with BFC, man
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Oct 11, 2019 07:11
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Spokes posted:Can’t win with BFC, man there's a pinball thread for talking about bad pinball related decisions such as this one surprised how much interest there is in the pinball aspect of things and how little in the instacart aspecti guess i just laid it so masterfully in the op that no one has any more questions :coolbert:
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Oct 11, 2019 15:48
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Spokes posted:Can’t win with BFC, man flips through notes "... being discerning with money."
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Oct 11, 2019 15:50
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Hoodwinker posted:Yeah, gently caress those guys and their I mean, the guy knows it's a silly hobby and an unjustifiable expense, so he's responsibly making money on the side to pay for it. He's keeping great records and figure people might be interested in the bottom line of the gig economy it's not his monthly budget where he's underwater because he's paying off a high-interest pinball loan, it's just a a/t thread about the side job (which is great since i live in orange county and thought about doing instacart and now i'm not going to, thank you)
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Oct 11, 2019 20:38
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It only takes 600 hours of hard labor to earn a pinball machine. The American Dream is still alive, folks.
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Oct 12, 2019 02:17
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Spokes posted:I mean, the guy knows it's a silly hobby and an unjustifiable expense, so he's responsibly making money on the side to pay for it. He's keeping great records and figure people might be interested in the bottom line of the gig economy
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Oct 12, 2019 10:07
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Vox Nihili posted:It only takes 600 hours of hard labor to earn a pinball machine. The American Dream is still alive, folks. it'll be the most expensive thing i own by a few orders of magnitude 
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Oct 14, 2019 17:03
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other little stuff i've though about and would recommend to people doing the job: carry a quarter in case you have to go to Aldi bag your own poo poo, don't stand there watching the store people do it, they loving hate that learn how to pick a melon, a pepper, an avocado, etc. ask people if they want help bringing groceries in, they are always delighted and you're already carrying the poo poo anyway there is food everywhere and delis smell good, you will be actively resisting the temptation to eat; on the other hand a 10 hour shift is easily 5 miles worth of steps yes, people will order stuff like pregnancy tests and astroglide ...i'm sure ill think of more
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Oct 14, 2019 17:08
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boar guy posted:it'll be the most expensive thing i own by a few orders of magnitude Unless you're actually paying $1.80 per month for your car instead of $180, then no, it's not several orders more than your car...
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Oct 15, 2019 03:26
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SpelledBackwards posted:Unless you're actually paying $1.80 per month for your car instead of $180, then no, it's not several orders more than your car... here it is folks, the most pedantic post ever made on SA
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Oct 15, 2019 05:11
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I have also driven for Instacart and can answer questions if it’s okay with the OP. I worked the Austin zone as a combined full service shopper/delivery-only guy for I think a little over a year and hated every second of it. Unlike some other zones, mine didn’t have guaranteed hourly pay when I worked there, and to make matters worse the zone itself was loving HUGE; I had A LOT of batches where the customer and the store I had to go to were a 45+ minute drive apart from each other (in Austin TX traffic, no less). This was especially bad on delivery-only batches, both because DO batches pay the worst, and because most DOs go to several different customers, which you have to deliver to IN A CERTAIN ORDER, and they don’t tell you where each customer lives until after you’ve accepted the batch and gotten to that customer’s place in line. That last part doesn’t sound so bad, except that in practice, you ended up getting tons of DO batches where the first customers on your delivery list were right near the store you had to pick up from... and then the last one was CLEAR ACROSS TOWN, an aforementioned 45+ minute drive from the last customer. I had several of these where the last customer took me over an hour to get to. It was extremely bullshit. A lot of people including me tried to avoid doing DO batches altogether, but any time you refused a batch of any kind IC would give you a “reliability incident”, which if you got a certain number of (I think 5) in a certain timespan, the company would make it a lot harder for you to get hours to work, which cut into your pay a lot. To try to mitigate this, a bunch of people in my zone eventually started doing DO batches and only delivering to the customers near the respective stores, and then refusing to do the across-town last deliveries by making up some excuse why they couldn’t do it to try and avoid getting an incident (or just straight-up telling IC to go gently caress themselves and taking an incident anyway because gently caress that poo poo). Sadly, I don’t think IC ever learned a lesson from any of this; as far as I know the clear-across-town batch poo poo is still happening in at least the Austin zone and probably a whole bunch of others. It also didn’t help that IC actively hosed over its employees constantly. When I started working for them, we were told that IC was moving away from customer tips as its primary source of payment for drivers, in favor of paying based on the number of items in full-service shopping batches and upping the pay per delivery for DO batches. Apparently, this DRASTICALLY reduced the amount IC drivers got payed, because both of those systems amounted to less money than drivers had been making previously from tips. While IC did keep tipping around as an option... for reasons I still do not understand to this day, they deliberately redesigned their system to make it harder for customers to tip, mostly by hiding the tipping option in the app and I think actually misleading people into thinking that some other fee was already a tip. Unfortunately it’s been so long since I left that I forget exactly what they did to make tipping harder (I know they hid the option in the app, but the part about them misleading people may not be 100% correct), but I have a PDF for a flyer someone in an IC drivers Facebook group made for us to hand out to customers explaining the situation that goes into better detail on it. I’ll post a link to it here later. As for why I stuck around for so long despite all of IC’s bullshit, I was in college (still technically am but that’s another story), I needed a job where I could set my own hours, I was really desperate for money of ANY kind to pay rent, and I didn’t think I had enough time, work experience, or good grades to do anything better paying at the time (actually I’m kinda still not sure about those last two even now...... my life sucks and I hate myself  ).
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Oct 15, 2019 06:03
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I. M. Gei posted:I have also driven for Instacart and can answer questions if it’s okay with the OP. for sure I. M. Gei posted:I worked the Austin zone as a combined full service shopper/delivery-only guy for I think a little over a year and hated every second of it. yeah, i haven't met/talked to a single other driver that's been doing it for more than a month that likes it. it sucks pretty loving bad tbh i can spot someone working from a mile away...the desperation radiates off of usalmost walked out on an order today. $70 batch, over $600 worth of stuff at Costco. heavy item bonus (two 36 packs of water). i have a ford focus, i think i mentioned. they gave me one hour and five minutes to pick the order. the lady then texts me for extra poo poo and to hurry because she has to pick her kid up or something? i was like 15 minutes over the time they allotted me, the little timer in the corner was red, i was looking at like 9 more trips across the store, i said gently caress it. marked everything left in the order as out of stock and told customer service, hey she's gonna be pissed about this she lowered her tip from $40 to $30 so i still made $60 for the ninety minutes but man. i wanted to just walk in the worst way. first time i've honestly felt screwed; the low pay i expect but that poo poo was flustrating. i got to her house and put all the poo poo on the porch and then rang the bell and was like here you go thanks bye, when normally i bend over backwards to be nice and help and carry stuff to the kitchen for them. loving BOUGIE rear end HOE ORDERING $600 WORTH OF poo poo FROM A STORE THAT'S 3 MILES AWAY THEN RUNNING ME AROUND WITH A 200 POUND CART FOR ORANGE JUICE AND HOT COCOA AND TELLING ME YOU DIDNT MEAN TO RUSH ME, KISS MY rear end oh sorry about that haha edit: Gei, in your experience, are the people who just shop and don't drive like...super weird? or is it just here also the whole 'tipping' thing is a way for them to cook their books. the explanation for how they figure fees is suuuuuuper shady edit again: as a shopper, here's my advice to you as a customer don't get produce through instacart, especially if you are getting $250 worth of organic bullshit from mother's market. don't trust some instacart tweaker to divine what level of avocado ripeness is acceptable from across town, telepathically. buy that poo poo yourself the service is not designed to replace water delivery and ordering 10 6 packs of 5 gallon water jugs is just a dick move the service is not for $600 costco orders if you order weird organic hard to find bullshit and get a replacement you dont like, tough poo poo, shop for it yourself making people carry heavy poo poo up 3 flights of stairs if you are capable of doing it yourself is pretty lovely its a bougie as gently caress service for bougie as gently caress people, don't complain that it's expensive bear in mind that if you add poo poo to your order during it, the app doesn't add time to the timer. give your shopper a break
boar guy fucked around with this message at 16:42 on Oct 15, 2019 |
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Oct 15, 2019 06:10
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boar guy posted:for sure Thanks! I will say that from reading your OP, your experiences with IC and mine seem to be a lot different. Not sure how much of that is due to differences in how our zones work or if IC changed some poo poo since I left, but I did notice a few points you mentioned that didn’t really sync up with how things were for me that I’d like to touch on a bit later. boar guy posted:edit: Gei, in your experience, are the people who just shop and don't drive like...super weird? or is it just here If you mean the people who put together the delivery only orders and put them on the shelves for us to take, I never really had any interaction with them personally, but I want to say I heard some other drivers talking about them every now and then and basically saying they were assholes. boar guy posted:edit again: as a shopper, here's my advice to you as a customer 1000% agree with ALL OF THIS!! I’d also like to add to that first point by saying that, from my experience, produce is by far the most annoying, frustrating, and time-consuming part of a batch for a shopper, and we VASTLY prefer batches with very little or no produce at all over ones with a whole bunch of it. Not just because they’re easier, but because they take less time for us to fill, which is actually REALLY IMPORTANT for shoppers because IC uses the shoppers’ shop times to determine who gets the better, higher-paying batches. Shoppers that finish faster get more full-service shopping batches (which pay the most) and fewer delivery-only batches (which pay peanuts and, as I mentioned earlier, often force the shopper to drive outrageous distances to make deliveries, which burns both gas money and time we COULD be spending on other/better-paying batches). Because of all that, and this is one thing I did different from the OP, I always shopped for produce first to get it out of the way, because it seemed to shorten my shopping times a bit. The only parts of a batch that can potentially take longer than produce are the meat/seafood/deli/prepared foods counter stuff, and that depends a lot on whether or not you have to wait in line to get what you need, which you very often do. I’ve had many batches where I came VERY close to finishing in under my allotted shop time, only to go over because I had to wait in line at a counter to get something. I really wish stores would let IC shoppers cut in line to get what they need, because waiting in those lines hurts our shop times BAD, and like I said above, worse shop times lead to worse batches lead to worse pay for shoppers. I. M. Gei fucked around with this message at 07:56 on Oct 15, 2019 |
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Oct 15, 2019 07:31
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boar guy posted:for sure Isn't that quite a bit more per hour than you usually make?
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Oct 15, 2019 08:05
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Anyway I’ll post more about my experiences and stories with IC a bit later. Right now it’s like 2:15 AM where I am and I have to wake up early for a doctor’s appointment. One thing I will say before I punch out for the night is that I’m still in the private IC shoppers group on Facebook for the Austin area, which is chock full of posts about how much IC sucks and stories about rear end in a top hat customers. I’ll probably post some stuff from there in this thread (with names and poo poo censored, of course) unless the mods tell me not to for whatever reason. There’s more than likely an identical IC shopper Facebook group (or several) for every IC zone out there, and if any of you reading this work for IC and aren’t already a member of the group(s) for your zone (this includes you, boar guy), then I highly recommend joining because they can be pretty helpful sometimes.
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Oct 15, 2019 08:16
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Vox Nihili posted:Isn't that quite a bit more per hour than you usually make? yeah man but if you told me youd pay me a million dollars a year to get kicked in the face 8 hours a day for work id probably turn that down too
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Oct 15, 2019 15:05
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