Pros
It’s not an independent contractor position. You are a part-time employee, so you get taxes taken out. Some flexibility with schedule. You choose your availability and they schedule you within that time frame. They say you won’t be penalized if you cancel your shift 24 hours in advance, but then they started sending scary warning emails about canceling shifts. They aren’t as flexible as they advertise.
Cons
Their underlying motto is quantity over quality. They don’t care about hiring quality, professional employees. They don’t do background checks. All they care about is that you shop a ridiculously fast pace. They provide an hour of training and then send you off on your own. They don’t care about quality customer service, because the don’t give the shopper enough time for that, to talk to the customer and make a good replacement for them if needed. The whole job is done in an app that often has issues, and doesn’t take into account lots of different variables on the job. At the end the of each shift you get a number of your average speed for the day. If you have completed a certain number of orders with the company, and your speed isn’t 60 seconds per item, they fire you. But before they do, they provide “coaching,” which is really your shift lead doing 1 order with you, to get your time for that order down. They don’t give you any special tricks to be faster, but you end up faster for that specific order because 2 people doing the job is faster than 1. It doesn’t matter if you are a quality employee or if your customers are happy. It doesn’t matter if you are improving. All that matters is that you meet that goal so that Instacart can get more orders. That’s how they get paid. This can be unrealistic a lot of times when you consider having to wait in long store lines or waiting for meat to be cut at the deli counter. They don’t pay attention to details and they set you up for failure. I was told that I would make an hourly wage plus 20% of the service fee given to Instacart for each order. But that didn’t align with what I actually got in my paycheck. I was lied to.
