Instacart is a company that operates a grocery delivery and pickup service. The business allows customers to order groceries online, leaving the shopping to someone else. This service is advertised as a side hustle – where you can make quick cash – but in reality, driving for Instacart is simply not worth it.
I was feeling broke one day, and decided to pick up an Instacart order. $23 plus a tip for putting 100 items in a shopping cart: should be easy money, right? Boy, was I wrong. After spending time hunting down ten kinds of bread, extremely specific organic tomatoes, and quite literally 50 other items, I had the fullest cart I had ever seen in my life. However, that wasn’t the end of my struggle. My phone was about to die and I still had 50 more items to find. I’ve been less stressed during my finals, and I was only making $30 tops for more than two hours of work.
The worst part of my instacart experience was being unable to find an item and needing to substitute it. As my phone’s battery waned, I was substituting milk for beans out of sheer desperation. Eventually I managed to get close to everything I needed, but realized I didn’t have any bags. This was a major problem because I was at Aldi, where shopping bags cost money. I wasn’t about to spend my own money on Aldi bags just because I didn’t plan ahead. So I ended up dragging the whole cart out to my car, where by some saving grace a lady who I had talked to earlier about instacarting asked if I needed some bags. And by God, I did.
So after she gave me the bags I finally dragged the whole order to the customer’s house. When I finally got home, I realized that the $23 did, in fact, include my tip. Dear Instacart, never again.
Bekki Antonelli is from
Wellesley, Mass.
Her major is computer science.
