A company I do contract work for banned Instacart from one of their local stores entirely due to customer complaints to store management about unapproved substitutions.
Maybe a majority of customers don't care enough about unapproved substitutions to review poorly? Though reading through this thread suggests otherwise. Maybe there's some other internal metrics which shoppers or Instacart have access to that incentivize poor substitutions in the name of speed?
Honest questions - I don't know anything about this business and it's interesting to me that it appears to be such a pervasive issue.
Although I suspect complaining to either the store itself or to InstaCart is going to be relatively futile, it seems that having the store managers bubble their complaints upward to regional managers may be more effective than complaining directly to InstaCart. Corporate makes decisions like that partnership, and if all of the store managers in a region are making the same complaint to HQ, maybe something might change. Maybe.