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Comment by monadic2 | Hacker News Reader

I have had so many bad experiences with instacart:

* shopper buying yams rather than potatoes (note: this was not a replacement, they seemed to genuinely believe they had bought potatoes.)

* shopper going to checkout before I can suggest a better replacement for an item.

* shopper buys obviously moldy fruit.

* shopper buys five roaster chickens as a replacement for five cornish hens.

* shopper gives up really easily on trivial things like a common chip brand.

It’s frustrating because I can both understand the shopper, but I then need to give instacart more money to actually get the food I’ve verified by phone they have in stock. Furthermore, about 80% of these omissions are most easily fixable if I just drive to the store and buy it. So yea, I just do my own shopping again so I don’t spend $30 on delivery fees and tips and end up spending $5 on furry strawberries.

I don’t understand why instacart can’t work with the store to pack the inventory by people who know where shit is, can identify products, and can inquire about inventory. Other delivery services do just fine with a two-legged approach.

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Interacting with instacart sums up the expression: ”if you want something done right, do it yourself”.

At least for me, having to go a store is not a big deal, it’s just overcoming “inertia to leave home”. I would much rather: order directly from the store, have the store pack everything up, express pick it up from the store, and have a confirmation expected=actual for the order.

The abstraction to having a third-party like instacart do all the - for lack of a better word - “order management” just seems to create an extra layer of bullshit to deal with.

Going to the store, picking everything normally, and going through checkout myself, while not as convenient, has still consistently yielded the best results - so there is still a lot of catching up to do for store/third-party services to reach that level of performance(?).

> I would much rather: order directly from the store, have the store pack everything up, express pick it up from the store, and have a confirmation expected=actual for the order.

My store (Kroger) does exactly this, and I've been very pleased with the service once they worked out the kinks in the first few weeks of quarantine.

Having worked for Kroger satellite offices, this is funny because they announced a "partnership" with Instacart while I was there.

You'd imagine there would be a lot of shared labor, but most of their business decisions were only ever implemented at C-level while managers were clueless as to what was actually being integrated.

Some places make you dread going to grocery stores. Even club stores that require membership are bad. The experience has been nothing short of a nightmare off late, even prior to these pandemic times.

Costco & Whole Food stores have especially declined in overall shopper experience. Clueless store staff, shoddy inventory levels, incompetent employees who cant be bothered to educate themselves on elementary details, rude and crass shoppers, shoppers who dont return their carts to the corrals, thinning variety of offerings, long lines at checkout, lack of adequate number of self checkout terminals .... the list goes on.

I recall even 3-4 years things weren't so bad at these two very different stores. Now they're almost uniformly bad.

I just wish they had large refrigerated silos outside the store in the parking lot, where they could let you pick up your online orders like Walmart does.

I always return my shopping cart, but I am vexed to no end that Costco cannot bother to have more than one cart corral for every square mile.

Whole Foods stinks. I used to shop there a lot but, as the years went on, their employees became more clueless and apathetic, the checkouts became very slow, and the food from the hot bar got really bad. I mean like they add too much salt and everything has no flavor, which is weird because they seem to have no problem adding sugar to things, yet somehow their food kinda tastes bad to me now. Maybe I've changed. IDK

Plus, the worst thing about Whole Foods stores is the layout. Whole Foods stores tend to be laid out in such a way that there are shelves and bins that are effectively obstacles you have to dodge, turning the shopping experience into a human pechinko machine. I know they think this will get people to buy more, but it makes me not want to come back because it's so unpleasant having to try and serpentine around their bins of stuff and get stuck behind people half the time.

Lousy store experience is one reason why I don't want to go grocery shopping in general, and it's why I am much more likely to patronize a grocery store with self checkouts.

Except for Sprouts, which I love despite their lack of self checkouts. It's probably the only grocery store I genuinely like visiting.

I dont know how they pulled off the Wild Oats [1] [2] acquisition years ago - or if things were just as bad back then, because I didn't shop at Whole Foods in those years.

But I wish we had a greater array of upmarket or upmarket-adjacent stores that carried fresh & nutritious offerings that you didnt have to label-check twice before buying.

There must be something fundamentally wrong with grocery store margins in the US ( or just in California ) that no one seems to be able to make a buck consistently to keep standards high.

I hear great things about Wegmans & they've been forever in the mid-Atlantic states. Its telling they havent chosen to set up shop in California despite plentiful metro areas that could support such fare.

I never really thought very expensive California real estate markets would be the places for future food deserts but we're nearly there.

[1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_Oats_Markets

[2]

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-wholefoods-ftc/whole-food...

Check out Lunardi’s - assuming you are in the Bay Area. Wonderful staff (Union), high quality produce, great bakery and butcher.

Could be that they don't want to deal with the business climate there.

Amazon's Whole Foods delivery in my area is now direct from warehouse to home instead of in-store picking. It's so, so much better than Instacart. On my last large order of almost a hundred items, not a single replacement, I got exactly what I ordered the same day. Instacart is such a sub-standard experience, it's just fundamentally the wrong approach and we wouldn't accept it for any other type of online purchase.

They’re still in-store picking. It’s just that Whole Foods/Prime Now has dedicated employees for this.

It's brand new as of April, it's definitely coming from a warehouse in an area where there is no Whole Foods store (I can track the path of the delivery van in the app). It's also not someone delivering with their own truck as before, but a blue-gray Amazon van, and the availability of items is spot on which was never the case even pre-covid.

Interesting. And you’re ordering from Whole Foods in the app and not just selecting Whole Foods items from the Amazon option? I know there are many Whole Foods items available on the Amazon section now.

I have had the same experience with ordering Whole Foods and Amazon Fresh in the bay area. Everything I order arrives.

I tried using a different grocery delivery and about 30% of what I ordered was out of stock. This was especially frustrating because delivery slots were in short supply here, so I felt rude making another small order immediately to fill in missing items. With WF/AF I at least know what is out of stock when making my order so I can choose my own substitutions or not bother trying to get ingredients for a recipe if something critical is missing.

I find it hard to believe instacarts model is still the best way of doing online grocery shopping in America... In the UK there's Ocado that has their own warehouses and most of the selection and packing is automated. If there are replacements you're told in advance and can accept or reject the replacement

Most of the main supermarket chains have followed suit and have similar services

There are other options, we have Peapod in my area. It’s the same stuff in grocery stores but from the warehouse. This pandemic has them overburdened and I can’t seem to find a delivery time. I tried Instacart once and the shopper was great but with so many things being out of stock I end up having to go out anyway. That plus the markup on all the items (the receipt was $20 less than what Instacart charged me, not including fees and delivery and tip).

Agreed, I used peapod back in philly and it was worth every penny.

Peapod seems to never have certain common items, for example: Funyuns, diet Dr. Pepper...

Maybe combine Peapod with GoPuff? They have never disappointed in the “I’m high as shit and just want some fucking Funyuns” segment of the market.

I'm trying to get sponsored by Funyuns, so I'd need to be eating them at work.

Wow – I haven't thought about Peapod in years! I didn't even know they were still around.

I remember their trucks in the 90s or early Aughts. I think they only delivered Stop & Shop at that point (in my area), because they're owned by the same parent company.

Ocado is an amazing company. Their warehouses are a beautiful feat of automation [0]. They have signed deals with a few U.S. supermarket chains so you should expect the Ocado experience in the sometime in the near future.

EDIT: Their other robotic platform [1]

[0] https://youtu.be/XJqsdprXF5c

[1] https://youtu.be/4DKrcpa8Z_E

The code that runs all that must either be elegantly simple or ridiculously complicated. In either case, what's in those videos is the future.

Sounds like instacart is independent from the shop it delivers from, and collects your groceries by hand. Is that correct? It sounds very inefficient to me.

In Netherland, the largest supermarket chains all deliver to your home. (Used to be to your kitchen, but Corona changed that.) We've had our groceries delivered by Albert Heijn for about a decade now, and it's generally pretty good. You pay about EUR 5-10 for delivery depending on the time of day you want it.

Two issues: when they don't have an item, you just don't get it. I'd prefer to get an alert a day in advance so I can select a replacement item, but that's apparently not an option for whatever reason. The other is of course perishables. Usually it's fine. Sometimes the bananas are a bit greener than I'd like, sometimes they're a bit yellower than my son likes (he likes them green for some reason). Sometimes the use-by date is in two days when we were planning to use it in 3 days. Never got anything moldy, though if something's moldy, broken or otherwise wrong, you get a discount on the next purchase, no questions asked.

Not having to lug groceries around is great. Sometimes we still need to go to the supermarket to get one or two items, but that's no big deal.

I'm the designated shopper in my family, since my wife has higher risk factors for COVID-19. Usually when we go shopping, I push the cart and pick the obvious items, but leave most of the picking to her because she's very specific in what she wants.

But now I have to do it.

I totally sympathize with the Instacart shoppers. Even with direct access to my wife via text including pictures, it's still hard to find exactly what she wants, and it takes a long time and a few passes through the store.

They're not getting paid enough to care or do it right. Instacart needs to pay their pickers a lot more if they want it done right, but then of course they don't have a viable business model anymore.

Ha, same. I'll resort to facetime to figure out what that one thing she wants is.

I hated, loathed, and despised doing the shopping for my wife at Whole Foods. It’s not the store that’s the problem, it’s that she wants to graze the entire bloody flipping hot bar, and she insists I get a bunch of stuff they don’t actually have in stock, or where they ran out of stock hours ago.

She can shop for herself online, either via Whole Foods Market on Amazon, or Instacart.

Either way, I’m done.

This reminds me of the price/quality matrix:

* Using your own money to buy something for yourself: price and quality matter.

* Using your own money to buy something for someone else. Price matters, not quality.

* Using other people's money to buy something for other people. Neither price nor quality matter.

It's one of the explanations for how we end up with so much waste with governments and organizations. They use other people's money to buy something for other people.

I’m a shopper at a grocery store and I do my best to shop like I’m shopping for myself. Am either fast or in my training grace period. I’m a terrible employee generally, too much care. I assume I’ll be fired and will do my best shopping until then. I did get the job randomly and had shopped there often prior, a clerk brought me to the hiring manager so it was easy to get hired. Of course each day it sinks in that it’s a business with managers and metrics. At least programming technical debt paid well, it seems clear that outside of boutique consulting it’s all about the numbers... good to know for sure.

We've had an ok experience with instacart. I've tried to think of it sort of like ... when you stop at a little store in a small town before going camping, and there's not a great selection and it's kind of expensive. But you are happy to get some of the things you need, and it's ok if it's not perfect, because we're in the middle of a disaster of epic proportions.

That said, I'm really looking forward to doing my own shopping too. Sometimes stuff comes to mind that I didn't think of to put on my list, or I have an idea for a meal, looking at other things.

Off-topic, but do you really view that "we're in the middle of a disaster of epic proportions"? I can think of a huge number of actual disasters of epic proportions (full-scale nuclear war, 100 kilometer asteroid impact, yellowstone super caldera explodes, an actual pandemic that has 99% effective death rate arises, etc.) The current situation seems pretty low-key compared to a real disaster.

The hundred thousand people dead and millions out of work in the US alone would like to have a word with you about your denial that the COVID-19 pandemic is not of epic proportions.

I'd be happy to speak with them. It is a sad state of affairs, but in my book, a disaster of epic proportions is a large percent of the world population dying. It is a disaster of such proportions that entire nations collapse. It is a economic depression that lasts for generations. What we are going through right now is like a hangnail compared to your entire foot being ripped off. It is scary for the people most affected, but hardly a disaster of epic proportions.

I’m curious what you would call this situation then?

A disaster. It's not epic, yet. Now if the virus starts mutating and we start getting a million death a day, then I'd definitely start calling it epic.

I think you're ignoring the meaning and history of the word "epic". For one thing, it comes from a time when cities and armies were thousands instead of millions, and for another, it just never was based on some specific numeric scale.

One description is: "...involving a time...in which occurred the extraordinary doings of the extraordinary men and women who, in dealings with the gods or other superhuman forces, gave shape to the moral universe for their descendants...to understand themselves as a people or nation"

2,996 people are confirmed to have died in the 9/11 terrorist attack, and look at how the country reacted. Compare that to today where more than that die (just from coronavirus) every day. There’s now over five million dead people who are believed to have died from it.

Not to get too off topic, but it’s very concerning that a very substantial portion of the (US) population is convinced it’s some kind of “hoax” being used for political gain.

I am not disagreeing this is an epic disaster but let's keep the facts straight. There are over five million people believed to be infected with Covid-19 counted. The confirmed death count is ~355k.

Ah yes. Correct. My quick google search for a statistic shows 5 million something in the preview text with no detail and I took it for deaths. My bad.

Still, that’s 100x 9/11, and people are saying it’s no big deal. That was my point.

5 million is a huge and terrifying number. But the post you are responding to is clearly putting this in the context of WW2-like or worse numbers, where 85 million people died. That constituted 3% of the global population at the time, equivalent to 231 million people dead today.

None of your "actual disasters" have actually happened.

For most living Americans, I think you can make a fair argument that this is the biggest disaster in their lifetime. Though I'm open to give other candidates a fair hearing.

Keep in mind that this one is far from over yet!

> For most living Americans, I think you can make a fair argument that this is the biggest disaster in their lifetime.

I'm in my 40ies, and while other things are more easily boiled down to a single image or two that get seared in your brain, like the Challenger exploding or the airplane hitting the second tower, there's simply nothing like it to have happened here in terms of the toll in human lives and myriad other secondary problems.

The Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004 was pretty massive in terms of the death toll, but it was more localized in an area far from anywhere I've lived, and if we're looking at the total number of deaths, COVID-19 is well ahead of it.

I suppose part of it is my view is colored by my own experience. My governor totally shut down our state very early and still hasn’t really started opening it back up. Because of that we have had very very few cases. I don’t know of anyone that got sick, much less died. I very much live in a middle class neighborhood (receptionists, elementary school teachers, paramedics, mail men, etc.) but none of my neighbors or friends have been very affected by this pandemic. For most of us it has been like an extended vacation. I’m still working from home, but it is much different than going into an office. Frankly I’ll probably look back at this time as one of the high points of my life. Now if I lived somewhere like LA or NYC, my view of this time would be very different.

It's interesting how much all of this depends on some people's ability - or lack thereof - to look at and contemplate life beyond their bubble.

I mean... I'll admit that when it was just something in China, I didn't pay a ton of attention. But when it hit Italy - a modern, wealthy country with great health care, and honest reporting... it was obvious that it was real, and serious. The image of the army trucks carrying away bodies from the hospital will stick with me for a long time.

If you haven't been hit hard, you're lucky, and it's likely because things got shut down early.

I would call this epic over reaction. The actual virus is not as scary as being reported in the news. The death rate are very low. If this virus has death rate like ebola then that would be really is a disaster.

Even aside from deaths, the economic damage alone is rather epic.

That's due to the over reaction: the lockdown

Even if we accept that 100%, it doesn't make it less of a disaster.

If I had mentioned the current scenario as a possibility back in January, I would have been mocked. The other disasters I mentioned are within the realm of possibility in the next 5 months. What would we call them if we’ve already used epic disaster for the current crisis? A super epic disaster?

A guy told me once he was so hungry he could eat a horse. Did he think I was stupid? I called him out on it, of course. Nobody tries to pull one over on me and gets away with it. I love being right!

I'm not sure it makes a great deal of sense to plot everything on that sort of scale. That would mean we'd have to call earthquakes or hurricanes 'very small' disasters, and that doesn't seem right.

One of the big problems with InstaCart is that they own the relationship with the customer — all the store knows is that InstaCart shopper #76957831 bought certain items. That’s it.

And InstaCart keeps your history, so if you want to buy those same items somewhere else that is cheaper, then InstaCart makes that easy.

These are not problems for the customer, but they are problems for any store. Any store worth doing business with should want to fully own that relationship.

InstaCart is also not tied into the back end inventory system. They know, from previous shopping trips they’ve done, what is commonly stocked where, and what might be low on stock. But they don’t know for sure until the shopper gets there and starts going down the aisle.

So, a bad experience for the store, unless you really can’t do anything better. And not a great experience for the customer.

HEB has recently started doing curbside service in our area. IMO, it’s much better than InstaCart. If they could hook that up with a delivery service, I think they’d have a goose that lays platinum eggs.

I'd ditch Instacart if there were something better pretty quickly, but it's been a nice, low stress way to get food and essentials.

Whole Foods / Amazon Fresh deliveries are like a thousand times better for me in west LA and come at very low cost. The chain of quality control is going to be a big reason that this moves back in-house IMO.

Agreed. Shopper buys yellow cilantro with brown spots and bag is full of water. I plan a meal around protein and shopper gets everything except the protein. Shopper substitutes regular soda for diet soda. Everything at the store is not listed on the site.

I've ordered items from Starbucks and when I walk in to get the order they state that the item is not in stock.

The ability for grocers to know exactly what is in stock and what isn't in realtime isn't something they are designed to do and isn't a trivial ask.

Right, but they could pack the food and ask me to verify before delivering, same as at starbucks.

In fact at starbucks I’m rather shocked this is an issue—you don’t have the weird issue of products being in someone’s cart while they appear in inventory, let alone blatant theft! You’d think they would be able to provide an accurate inventory in realtime.

EDIT: also, to clarify, “by phone” in my previous post meant I called the store to ask if they have the item my shopper couldn’t find. They put me on hold to check the shelves.

Another solution is to allow to made a purchase days before. I can plan my cart for a week and most of items are recurrent. So they know what they need and they can fill those orders in advance.

> shopper buys obviously moldy fruit.

This happened with my last Costco purchase. I don't know how the produce was even out on the floor let alone being picked up by the delivery person who clearly didn't use their sense of vision (nor smell!). The previous time they picked some random substitution for something I explicitly marked as "do not substitute" due to allergies. I think I'm done using that service.

> person who clearly didn't use their sense of vision (nor smell!)

When people are paid by quantity not quality you don't take time to inspect or smell the merchandise. You grab what checks the box and move on. Its a numbers game not a quality game and the quality is deferred to the store supply instead of the shopper. Why is anyone surprised by this? Its the same reason an Uber driver may drive recklessly to pickup more fares. Your safety isn't their concern.

My first, and last, instacart experience had the shopper cancel all of the items in my order and then charge me a service fee.

She said the store closed before she could do the shopping. The store was already closed when she selected my order to pick up. Setting the tip amount before the service is rendered is a horrible idea as well.

Shop local at independent stores. The service and knowledge of the workers is worth it.

I think the big thing to remember is that Instacart offers a no lift in model for grocery stores to compete against Amazon/Walmart without doing anything to improve aging system. These companies do not have the expertise to become full distribution centers build a website that their customers will enjoy using. They are in bed with Instacart out of fear

Our local 3 store grocer offers shopping for 5$. You have to pick it up at the store but you don't have to go inside. They've been doing it for about a year. Never had a problem with it and their online interface is perfectly matched with their inventory. They text their replacements which you can reject before pickup.

Yeah, if the experience was an automated warehouse in which you know you're getting exactly what you want (and if it's not listed, it means they don't have it), it would be a lot better.

The whole checkout experience can be automated, and the final items only need to be picked up and delivered.

I like ordering groceries online, but I think the idea of instant grocery shopping is flawed.

1) You're depending on & supporting an oppressed segment of the labor force (people who need multiple jobs to make ends meet, because no 'gig economy' startup pays a living wage), 2) You're fighting with "surges" of use and paying wildly varying prices, with wildly varying levels of service, 3) You don't even get the items you're looking for half the time (in my experience), 4) It's more expensive!, 5) you don't actually need groceries delivered to you instantly.

Since COVID-19 I have switched to buying from local businesses and getting food from Co-ops and farm shares (and growing my own). I can schedule regular deliveries of produce to my door in bulk (in reusable containers), which not only reduces waste, it actually helps me plan my week/month better, I still get all the things I wanted, the price is fair, and I'm helping local farms and businesses.

I'm pretty sure the reason most people don't do this is that they're lazy, selfish, greedy and entitled. My evidence is the last two weekends I've ventured out into the world to look at apartments to rent, with the occasional jaunt to a hiking trail. I found virtually nobody was wearing a mask or socially distancing, unless they were forced to by a greeter in front of a business like a grocery store (many customers were trying to walk in without a mask, and thankfully were rebuffed). Many probably could have ordered online the same way I did, but would rather the immediacy of 'do it yourself' - even during a pandemic.

Sadly it's the poorest and most vulnerable people that need grocery delivery the most, because they have the hardest time getting to a store. A poor person in a food desert may need to spend over two hours round trip on transportation in order to get food, and an elderly person may just not be mobile enough. I doubt we would ever fund a public delivery service for them (though in theory the postal service could).

As someone without a car, I really want to like various grocery delivery services... Unfortunately every single time I've ordered groceries has been a less than stellar experience. Even Amazon Fresh.

And also substituting generic brand for brand gives higher ROI

I've had almost the opposite experience. I got one questionable bag of onions. Otherwise, after five or six orders, I could not be happier.

yeah but the joy of getting fresh baguettes delivered instead of merely getting left over sustenance in an after thought after a long day at work

another perspective

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