Both 5 and 10% are pathetic.
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I think $20+ an hour is pretty reasonable. I’ve done 10-13% my last few orders (I bump the good ones up from 10%).
Instacart marks up prices quite a bit and takes a service fee, some of which gets passed on to the shopper. So I think it’s safe to assume they’re getting at least an extra $5, thus getting them to about $25/hr which is $50K a year with two unpaid weeks off. If that’s pathetic, what do you think an Instacart shopper should be making? $100K a year?
I think pre-pandemic, $10-12/hr would be a market rate for this kind of work and $15/hr would be as low as I’d want to go to try to make it a living wage. So this is boosting my pre-pandemic rate by 66% as a hazard pay.
That’s on par with paramedics, teachers, entry level for nurses, and almost 3.5 times minimum wage. I had a shopper ask me to give her a review so she could keep getting “good customers like you,” so I have a feeling 10% is well above average, pathetic though you may find it to be.
The shoppers can also see the tip up front, so they know what they’re getting if they take the job. As long as you’re keeping them at a living wage and not bait and switching, I think that’s fine. Keeping stores less crowded is also a small public service.
If anyone’s getting screwed here it’s the workers in the store likely making < $10/hr and taking on tons of risk.
…as independent contractors who don’t get sick pay or vacation days or a pension or 401k matching or payroll tax matching or health insurance or dental or vision or the ability to file for unemployment.
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As someone self-employed making about 25% of my usual, I’m aware of the pitfalls of independent contracting. For starters, that’s why I only multiplied it by 50 weeks instead of 52. At the end of the day, I think at $25/hr as independent contractors they’re still doing way better than 90% of people doing comparable work.
They should be getting double time hazard pay too.
Hum…had to look…
“According to Indeed, though, Instacart shopper earnings (including tips) average out to $14.64, while Indeed’s figure for driver salaries is just $11.62 per hour. So yeah, if you’re thinking about working for Instacart, your experience could be different. You may be one of the fortunate ones who lands a sufficient number of decently-paid “batches” and lucks out with generous tippers, or you could wind up underpaid, frustrated, fed up, and looking for a new gig.”
No paid sick days and low wages. Hope people get the ones who are well paid so they can take a day off instead of coming to work sick.
They get paid $7 an order on the majority of orders. 10% is insulting imo
ETA Apparently I was just as angry a month into this pandemic as I am on month 9
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So $27/hr is insulting? You’ve been against Instacart itself existing for the entire pandemic because you think it’s wrong in and of itself. So I guess having all the at-risk people go to the store themselves is better? Increase mortality rate and increase community spread? Then the unemployed people can just stay home and make $0?
Sounds like a real win-win.
Most of my Instacart shoppers/drivers are making over $20/hr from me, the only ones who aren’t are really slow (which probably means they’re doing multiple orders at once and making a higher hourly anyway when combined).
But that’s insulting? Okay, what should they make then? $40/hr? $100/hr?
Rather than speculating we can look at actual data from shoppers:
Seems like $20/hr is about standard. However, this income tends to be skewed towards peak times (ie, not everyone could get that 40 hours per week), there is other time spent driving from store to store that isn’t included (which drives the wage way down based on driving time and expense), and some markets are more saturated than others.
I’ve done Instacart. It’s horrible. People love using it for heavy items like bottled water or 50 pound bags of dog food. And you only get paid for one item. Instacart will tell you that you get something like $1.50 an item. But what they don’t tell you is you get $1.50 if there’s one of that item or 5 of that item. So you might get 3 cases of bottled water and you get paid for one. And a lot of these people live in apartments on 2nd or 3rd floors. I quit after a week.
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What does the $20/mean if it’s driven down by time that’s not included? <$20/hr. I doubt Indeed did anything comprehensive, but their $14.64 sounds like the best estimate itt so far. And if that doesn’t include wear and tear on their personal cars it ends up being like the data that has been gone over more extensively for Uber/Lyft, where people are actually making much less.
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I was gig economy before it was cool - driving my own car for Quick Delivery. It suuuuuucked. I got out Kelley Blue Book and did the math and realized I was probably losing money.
Luckily they switched me to a route driving one of their vans for McKesson. I went from $250/week minus gas and car depreciation/maintenance - to $400/week driving someone else’s van with gas paid for. I was rich bitch! Moved up to Bud bottles instead of Old Mil Light, and Sapphire and tonic instead of well gin.
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I haven’t moved up past Bombay Sapphire and tonic yet :(
So ordering in off peak hours is helping them. I tend to order between 2pm and 8pm, I’ll try to shift that back to 12pm to 4pm.
The only remotely heavy thing I get is 64oz bottles of iced tea, but if they are only delivering it to my driveway I don’t think the weight should matter a ton.
When did you try Instacart? I thought they played a flat amount per order, and the rest was tips? I’m wondering if you did it pre-pandemic because I could see people just using it for heavy stuff pre-pandemic, and maybe the per-item rate is how they used to do it? IIRC they changed their payment model a couple years ago. I used them once in 2019 when I was pretty sick and didn’t want to go out, I think that’s the only time I had used them pre-pandemic.
My guess is the $14.64 included a lot of pre-pandemic data, but who knows.
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It wasn’t really a struggle, but I saw this play out all the time for a few years when people who worked for me had to decide whether to meet at the jobsite or meet me in the morning and ride with me. If there’s a lot of travel, the vehicle is a big expense. I would guess I spent about $40k in 5 years with the slightly bigger used truck I was running when we were busy between gas, maintenance and depreciation.
There is nowhere to go. Hendrix for a change of pace every now and then.
25% minimum for all deliveries for me. Less if they make it a huge PITA - like delivering to wrong building which happens sometimes.
But yea basically always 25% for me. Sometimes more. If you can’t afford to tip dont buy deliveries… they have the worst job in the world.
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Yeah, this. The true cost of car ownership is the great American scam. Down payments, monthly payments, insurance, gas, maintenance, repairs, medical costs if you get in a crash, deductibles, citations, tag fees, depreciation–since these all come in spurts, irregularly and regularly over time, all with varying probabilities, people wildly underestimate the actual portion of their take home pay them spend on driving.
One time in the way way back I got in an Uber that was supposed to be a Mercedes A class but a CLS pulled up instead. I was like damn, nice car, and he said his was at the dealer for repairs and he was going to drive this one 16 hours a day until the repairs were done. Well done.
I’ve always looked at it as Uber drivers et al are basically borrowing against the value of their car - which might make sense in a pinch, but not as a lifestyle.
I did the delivery gig with my own car for two weeks. But I still managed to bend my door hinge when I parked downtown between two buildings, and a huge gust of wind took the door and yanked it open too far. I lost massive money on those two weeks.
I don’t need to do anything more than understand how the world works to know that people delivering groceries have crappy, low paying jobs that barely provide a subsistence living. And nobody working as an independent contractor should have their compensation calculated on an hourly rate solely for the time they are doing their most obvious work and without figuring expenses into the calculation.
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I worked uber/lyft in college to make ends meet during months I was short. I estimated the cost of deprecation at the time was about $.15/mile. You can drive 100 miles in a “shift.” Which is huge for your bottom line. Gotta get your car serviced every single month. After gas and my inflated insurance costs, I calculated I was making less than min wage.
This was at a time when uber encouraged riders not to tip.