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by randycupertino·10y ago·view on hn ↗
My friend works at Instacart, she says it totally sucks. Mainly because there's no guaranteed hourly pay and what she gets paid depends entirely on what the customers decide to give out as a tip. So for example sometimes she spends an hour grocery shopping for someone, then 30 minutes to drive to their house, and then the person can just arbitrarily decide to tip her $10. So she makes $10 for 90 minutes of work? That's below minimum wage. She says MOST people will tip $20 or $25 however not all. So all it takes is one cheapskate to not understand how long it takes for you to go and pick out and deliver all their groceries and you get totally screwed.

Apparently when she works in SF proper is the only place with a guaranteed wage, all surrounding areas you are at the mercy of what people decide to tip. Sounds outrageous, all it takes is one cheap idiot to completely ruin your shift and make it not worth it to work there.

6 comments
See, this is the problem with the entire business model. Your friend has now put the onus of paying her living wage on the consumer. I don't want to hire a personal delivery person for $10/hour. Unless I've got a $100+ dinner bill, tipping $25 sounds crazy to me. Calling people "cheapskates" for not doing so is completely unfair–especially when these people are already paying a delivery fee. Do you honestly think families in Omaha and Birmingham are gonna pay to have groceries delivered AND want to tip 20%?

To be clear, most of the blame falls on Instacart. But your friend should find a new job. A tip-only contractor job is as bad as a 100% commission telemarketer job (maybe worse).

The onus of a living wage is always on the consumer. Even if instacart were paying a living wage to the people who perform deliveries, they would need to reflect at least those wages and other expenses in whatever they charge the consumer (unless deliveries are subsidized by VC's or other interested parties).
> The onus of a living wage is always on the consumer

In the sense that the money has to come from somewhere, sure. But wages are paid by employers, and it's shitty to underpay your employees under the premise that the customer will make up the difference in tips. If a single customer failing to tip $20 pushes the worker under minimum wage for the day, then the system is broken and the worker is getting screwed, as usual. And make no mistake, this is how it was designed to work - if they actually cared about their workers, they would charge a reasonable delivery fee to the customer and give all of it to the delivery person.

In the restaurant world, the employer would have to make up the difference and ensure their employees make minimum wage if tips aren't enough. While that's still not satisfactory (to me, at least), it at least guarantees that a slow shift, or a lousy-tipping, long-staying, large-group table won't push you down to $2.13/hour level income (though minimum wage doesn't get you much more).
Of course, the pricing of resources should be complete and incorporate all costs. It is certainly unacceptable for tips to be required to make up a living wage.

However, no one should be under the delusion that the consumer is not responsible for those costs.

I'm not sure who in this scenario you think is delusional, or if you're conflating being delusion with being uninformed of the specific employment arrangement between the people you interact with and their employers. Excuse me, they aren't employers anymore, it's a contractor/"logistics match-making company" relationship now.
It is neither.

Certainly a business should follow the rules of its market, but I think that we agree that the expectation of a consumer is that the price they pay covers all expenses + profit.

As others have mentioned, I blame Instacart and not the consumer. I use and love Instacart's service. I had no idea the shoppers relied on tips as much as you say they do. Instacart makes it seem like it's just a little extra bonus, no big deal. You can't blame the consumer for not knowing that.
Completely fair. You're right- my ire should be at the company not the users.

I was just shocked, SHOCKED how little she was actually making vs how much they told her she was making when she took the job. She thought she was making $25 an hour, but after I helped her take a hard look at the math, she was really only making $5-$7 an hour, if that.

I definitely understand your frustration, but calling the people cheap idiots seems a bit harsh. Does Instacart give tipping guidance? As a user, I would just assume they pay reasonable wages and a tip should be just that... a tip, not a living wage.
Indeed, employee expenses (car, fuel, tolls, etc) and time (wage) should be accounted for in the service fee.

Tips should be at the customer's discretion.

As Instacart users, we've experienced some confusion on this front. They don't make it at all clear to their customers how the pickers are paid or how much they might or might not depend on tips.

I want to believe this is something Instacart employees could easily clear up by disseminating some information on the subject rather than hoping that Instacart will handle it.

This isn't something that a user should have to know. We're going down the wrong track by implying that they should. Instacart shouldn't be expected to share their compensation model for their employees or contractors publicly or with their customers, and users shouldn't be expected to know or care about it in order to make fair decisions. This is a business relationship of customer to service provider. Paying the price you're charged with an optional tip for good service is entirely appropriate.
You call them idiots. But they had items delivered to them for free. In my mind that is smart.

The real problem here is Instacart's model. But is it really a problem if your friend still works for them? Why does he/she do so? Maybe time to quit?

Ha, good points. You're right. Once I helped her crunch the numbers and it illuminated how little she was actually making ($5-$7 an hour after expenses) she decided to go back to walking dogs. Well, right now she's on a "mental health" break but I think she will be starting up walking dogs again in a few weeks.

imo it seems like these gig companies really benefit from exploiting underpaid workers who don't know any better and aren't connected/smart enough/empowered to fight back. She really believed that she was going to bring in $25 an hour like they told her she would be, didn't realize she had to account for taxes, calculating all the expenses etc.

Yea it's true and is rather unfortunate. Hope everything works out.
Then she should quit. There are certainly other people out there willing to do this type of simple work for a low wage. Instacart is basically passing it to the consumers so that the economics of the business work.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure she is going to, I know she and the other people that do it hate it. Shouldn't they be guaranteed minimum wage? I mean, if they don't make minimum wage they can sue, or report them to the Department of Labor, right?
Not if they're classified as contractors.

(Whether the contractor classification is reasonable is a whole other ball of wax)

Your comment implies that Instacart pays their employees $0. That can't be true.
They're not "employees," they're "private contractors"... but from what she told me, their is no absolutely zero base pay unless you're working in the city of SF. Everywhere else, Oakland, the Peninsula is $0 an hour and your only income is from the tips.

I really drilled her on this because at first I couldn't believe it and she's not the most savvy person so I wanted to make sure she realized how after gas expenses, wear and tear on her car and the additional 7.65% in FICA that she's going to have to pay (the half normally covered by employers), she's really only making about $5-$7 an hour, if that. Also the job really eats up all the data on her phone because she has be on her phone for Instacart to scan and check off every grocery item she puts in the basket, then use their GPS system for the deliveries, and it's not like they reimburse her for any of that. Instacart sold her on the job promising $20-$25 an hour and she's absolutely not been making anywhere NEAR that.

By way of comparison, she makes a guaranteed $20 an hour under the table walking dogs, so I think she is going to go back to doing that.

This article seems to verify:

> Instacart declined to confirm whether it offers base pay, and some Instacart workers told HuffPost they are not offered an hourly guaranteed wage.

> “It’s a really strange job, and there are many weeks where you’re just sitting in the car waiting for orders and hoping something comes in, not being paid to be there,” one of Instacart’s personal shoppers

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02/02/instacart-workers_n...