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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: 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.
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