Instacart announces new Covid-19 policies and plans to hire 250k more shoppers

Grocery stores should really just turn themselves into warehouses and only allow workers in the store. Grocery stores could provide safer working conditions by checking temps of employees before entering the store and providing masks and gloves for all workers. This would help mitigate the risk of covid exposure for both employees and customers.

My biggest gripe with this headline is the word "hire". Let's rephrase that to: "250k shoppers signed up". They were not hired. They don't have benefits, they don't have medical, and they are most definitely not employees.

Anyone know if they&#x27;ve fixed the bug where someone could set the tip to $50 and then remove it entirely at or after delivery (&quot;tip baiting&quot;)?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nypost.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;04&#x2F;10&#x2F;people-are-baiting-grocery-delivery-workers-with-big-tips-then-reneging&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nypost.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;04&#x2F;10&#x2F;people-are-baiting-grocery-del...</a>

As a consumer I highly recommend Amazon Fresh. No pre-paid tip bull shit if you don&#x27;t want to and in 50+ deliveries I&#x27;ve had exactly one bad experience that I left a customer support inquiry about - which never repeated itself.<p>Amazon logistics are unmatched and there is a very clean continuity between deliveries that shows quality control or at least per-location notes on accessing buildings and units efficiently.<p>Down side is you have to refresh the checkout page throughout the day in order to get a delivery window. Sometimes you luck out and can get same-day delivery, sometimes you have to wait a couple days.

Are there 250k people that are willing to work a job like this right now? Sure, there&#x27;s lots of unemployed, but for at least the next few months they&#x27;re getting ~60% of their base salary (up to some cap) + an additional $600&#x2F;week.

&quot;In March, the company announced it will hire 300,000 new full-service shoppers on top of its existing 200,000 shoppers. It has since met that goal, and with today’s hiring news, Instacart’s shopper network will be 750,000 shoppers. The company also announced earlier this month that it is more than doubling its care team, from 1,200 agents to 3,000 agents.&quot;<p>I am really surprised they have that many people doing this work! That&#x27;s not meant to be a comment on the work or the people or anything, just those numbers are HUGE. I had no idea they had so many people.

I know, slightly off-topic, but I wish instacart didn&#x27;t mark up the price of each item. It feels like it lacks transparency and is some sort of dark pattern because I don&#x27;t know how much I&#x27;m paying for, say, food and how much I&#x27;m paying instacart. I&#x27;d much rather see a flat % fee, say 10% or something.

Instacart needs to fix basically everything, it is in the name but they fail pretty hard at even being a cart and the web app is slow due to client side javascript. Looks like they are competing with AirBnB in how broken their web apps are. Hell some items exist, but are shadowed and in accessible presumably due to id and class collisions.

This sounds exciting but without UBI and UHC (housing and health) it just feels like a half measure. Engaging in necessary skilled labor is the ideal (liberal arts and sciences) - the next best is un-skilled necessary labor (grocery delivery lives here) and after that skilled un-necessary labor (eg visual and audible&#x2F;musical arts skills crafts games) and finally that leaves us with un-skilled in-necessary labor (Vices live here). If we have universal mutual aid as a guiding principal it would let people move towards where they need and want to be as their lower level maslavian needs would be apriori.<p>The reality as well is that many necessary forms of labor can be fulfilled by unskilled labor if we try (Automation lives here).

Oh wow, 250,000 new employees? That’s a lot of benefits and overhead this is going to cost them.

&gt; Last month, some Instagram shoppers went on strike.