As the article describes we've ended up in a position where so much money is being poured into a business where nobody is happy.
My food usually arrives cold or messy, the restaurant has been fleeced with fees, the rider has risked life and limb cycling it over for a pittance and the delivery app company has still lost money. Stop the madness.
I ask this sincerely. I've worked gig-economy jobs when and only when they were what I judged to be my best option at the time. When I've found other opportunities that had a mix of compensation/flexibility/benefits I preferred, I've switched to do that instead.
My experience strongly suggests to me that the same is true of most gig workers--they're choosing the best of the options available to them.
I don't see how removing their current best option somehow makes a better one appear that wasn't there before.
A lot of people working for instacart lost their jobs, probably right about the same time they lost the ability to drop their kids off at school all day. Instacart gave them an income stream that's flexible (they can pull a few high value shifts in the morning and then disappear for school hours, etc).
It's not as if Instacart was secretly walking off with bags of cash - they're losing money. The article sort of takes this snide about venture capitalists making money on it but that's speculation based profit - in other words, it's not taking money from the business or it's employees.
Instacart may never be profitable and that's an issue. They've avoided the very problematic behavior of DoorDash who was literally taking tips away from runners, and most people who post accounts of working for Instacart seem to like it though there are hiccups at times. In general my experiences with them have been decent - I always tip well and keep my orders simple and at off hours, only had the occasional issue.