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People are baiting Instacart workers with huge tips then slashing them to zero:
Instacart workers are being wooed by orders with large tips only to find them dropped to zero after a delivery has been made, according to a new report by CNN. Instacart lets users set their own custom tip with each shopping request, but it also allows them to change it for up to three days after an order is completed to adjust for experience. Workers, however, claim that some users have been abusing this feature, baiting them with big tips to get their shopping requests completed sooner amid the pandemic rush — only to find the tip slashed afterward without much feedback.
One Instacart worker said their tip was dropped from $55 to $0 despite finding everything the customer needed. Another worker claimed their tip changed to $0 since they could not find toilet paper in stock, to which the customer described in the feedback report as "unethical."
[...] Instacart says shoppers who experience tip-baiting can report instances in-app, though some workers say this relies too much on their end and that the company should make a 10 percent-minimum tip mandatory for all orders during the pandemic.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Sunday April 12 2020, @03:44PM (6 children)
Have you actually used instacart, or similar? I agree there should be a base pay level that covers the delivery person's mileage and a reasonable time for shopping and travel, however, on the deliveree's side of the experience we have gotten everything from groceries delivered more carefully selected and in better condition than we do for our own shopping (this, being a 1/10 rare experience) all the way down to missing items not noted as missing, substitutions not approved as substitutions (our local near monopoly grocery is particularly good at this "cramming" - giving you 2 of the $6.99 1lb cheese bags instead of the 1 $8.99 2lb cheese bag you ordered), and on rare occasions lovely experiences like somebody else's broken egg goo all over our stuff. Orders can arrive on time, days late, sometimes days earlier than promised - in the agreed upon time window or far outside.
So, I feel tipping is an appropriate component of the whole at-home delivery experience, but, yes, it should not be required for the workers to get tips just to meet their expenses.
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(Score: 2) by crafoo on Monday April 13 2020, @12:06AM (1 child)
I take your point, and it's why I was suggesting a mechanism to deny acceptance of deliveries that are not correct and timely.
But what about cheaters/lairs? That's an easy problem to solve for very expensive orders (not grocery items), but more difficult for smaller orders where the cost of arbitration for the escrow funds doesn't make it worth it. In these markets, I think publicly posted reputations for both buyers and sellers should solve most of this.
We could also try forfeiture of delivery fees. Hell, what does Eve Online do? It would probably be better than a "tip" that can be modified to 0 up to 3 days later. That "tip" is really just a bid for delivery fees, if we are honest about it. That's how it's being used.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Monday April 13 2020, @02:42AM
The position of being home with an empty pantry and a quoted 10-20% COVID infected rate out in the city leaves little choice but to accept what shows up and like it.
When I considered starting up an insta-cart like service back around 1998, the whole lynch-pin of the business was developing some kind of reputation for both drivers and customers, first timers were wild-cards who you desperately needed to recruit (on both sides) but who you knew nothing about. The preferred method of induction was to only send experienced drivers to new customers, and only send new drivers to experienced customers... that's probably impossible in the current situation.
The present problem is a difference in expectation of what that number means. To the legalistic/gamers of the crowd it's nothing - a number controlled by the customer to be whatever they want until 72 hours past delivery at which point they can decide... if the service had any decency toward their drivers they'd either flag it as such, or hide it from the drivers altogether. If they wanted to make it a binding bid for delivery... well, that's a service I as a customer would walk away from anytime the bid was up over about $2 - I'll put on the N95+gloves and get my own milk, thank you.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Monday April 13 2020, @06:17AM (3 children)
I'm on a different continent, but our (store-operated) grocery delivery programmes cap the price of substitutions at that of the original item you ordered - it's their loss if they have to substitute a more expensive item. Plus you have the ability to decline any substitutions you don't like, on delivery.
(There is also the option for them to say "sorry, it's out of stock", which I'm sure they'd do if the price difference is too vast.)
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday April 13 2020, @01:14PM (2 children)
Yeah, so... our local near monopoly grocer generally prices one option (out of their selection of dozens) somewhere near competitive prices with the pitiful remaining competition (said competition is operating out of a primary distribution hub 3000 miles away while the local monopoly's central warehouse is 200 miles away.) The other ten to thirty options they offer are all generally at prices 25-60% higher, unless you want something labeled organic or gluten-free, which I understand costs more, but the competition upcharges may be in the range of 20-30% while the near-monopoly seems to think it's worth 200-400% markup. My favorite example being the gluten free frozen pizzas, starting at $12.99 at the monopoly where they also offer regular pizzas at $4.99 buy-one-get-one-free, and, yet, the competition has gluten free frozen pizzas starting at $3.99?
I'll take any excuse of a trigger to rant about what a shithole that grocer has turned into over the 5 decades I've been shopping there, they squeezed the competition out of the market by eliminating silly rebate games (they used to give "green stamps" that you could redeem at a line of single purpose stores for durable goods like toaster ovens, oscillating fans, etc.), providing better selection at better prices in cleaner stores. Now that the competition is gasping on the ropes, they're back at the BOGO games, contemplating a "discount membership club" annual fee to get lower prices, bargain bins of crap they need to unload in your face as you walk in and down the main aisles, and prices to the sky - just a tick lower than Whole Foods and Fresh Market, most of the time except when they're not.
The particular trigger was: well, we only order the cheap options from there, so under your store's policies we just wouldn't be eligible for any substitutions ;-)
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Monday April 13 2020, @02:57PM (1 child)
Thanks for the added detail, but I think you may have misunderstood my explanation of the policy that most (all?) of our supermarkets follow:
If they need to substitute in an more expensive item (or multiple items) to fulfil your order, they typically do so, but will not charge more than the item you originally ordered.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday April 13 2020, @03:27PM
Ha, your country obviously lacks the capitalist value of: nothing comes for free.
There was a time, perhaps 10 years ago, when the local monopoly was in the process of squeezing out the competition that they would have done something like that. Now they're back to the "core values of society" where you "get what you pay for..."
Just to continue the rant... a couple of years ago, when I still shopped there on a regular basis, they offered just one bag of chips for less than $3. It was 12oz and had a picture of a Mexican on it (since the local populace is prejudiced and many simply wouldn't buy groceries "intended for Mexican families.") - well, that finally ended as they upped the price from $2 to $2.69, then a month later made the bag 16oz and raised the price again to $3.09. On one of my last trips into the store, they had the "Mexican Chips" "on sale" for $2 (you know, the regular price from the previous month). So, I threw two bags in the cart and checked out, only to see the price ring up as $2.69, even though there were signs all over for "Special Low Price! $2". So, to get them to make good on their error, you go stand at the "customer service" counter, wait while the homeless in front of you purchase their tobacco products and lottery tickets, and finally get to talk with the smiling manager who goes through seventeen gyrations at the register to hand you a store credit card for the difference, and if they're in a good mood they'll even kick in an extra buck or two to "thank you for pointing out the error". Now, it's not always their error - I ended up accidentally purchasing two half gallon tubs of sugar-substituted ice cream once, didn't notice the subtle difference in the packaging until I was loading it into the car, walked right back in and processed an exchange or refund, my choice, which they cheerfully did, as they put the ice-cream that I had walked out to the parking lot and back into "returns" because they can't resell refrigerated product that has left the store. Nice, but all in all the customer is usually not even making minimum wage for the time invested in processing the exchange.
So... to loop back somewhere near to where this diverged... the competition based 3000 miles away can manage to sell 32 oz bags of similar corn chips for $2.99, so I'm not sure why it was so impossible for our local chain to keep a $2 12 oz bag on the shelf, other than the fact that NOTHING in that store goes for less than $3 anymore, and it's rapidly heading for $5. Too bad that Amazon's Whole Foods is part of the inflationary process, rather than genuine competition. Oh, and we've got WalMart foods here, too, but somehow the "low price guarantee" store manages to not have even competitive prices on food.
🌻🌻 [google.com]