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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 12 2020, @06:48PM
Depending on the chain, there are different policies in place. Some will offer substitutions of size, brand or flavor in order to try and fill the order as best we can. Some won't offer it at all unless it's 100% what you ordered. In the case of meat and produce, the picker may not be allowed to fill the order if the quality isn't deemed to be acceptable, even if individual shoppers would happily buy it.
In terms of the delay, I think that's due to a misunderstanding. There are really 2 main factors here with delivery, there's the products being available and there's having somebody to physically bag the products and deliver them. If any of those last two items are out of whack, you'll see them delaying any attempt at delivering them. In many cases, they are fulfilling the items from the store shelves that other customers are free to take items from themselves.
As time goes on, this will get better as people will have a better idea as to what's going on, but the infrastructure for this has been deploying at breakneck speed with some grocers going from a few locations to all of them over the course of a few weeks.