They Were Deactivated from Delivering. Their Finances Were Devastated.

I'm retired (sort of) and my son lost his job. He had a house payment and that worried me. I noticed a girl at my local grocery store who seemed to be there every day. After questioning her, that's how I found out about Instacart. So I started with them.

I struggled with deliveries as most people do at first but eventually got quite good at it making a decent, even surprising amount of money. But, one day, I was scheduled to deliver groceries to an apartment with an address for the complex but no apartment number and no name on the apartment doors.

I contacted support who called the customer who asked if I could wait 15 minutes for them to come home. Having nothing going on that day I said, "Sure." 25 minutes later I called support again. Customer says they're almost there. "I'll wait," I said.

Customer doesn't show. Called support. They tell me to return the groceries to the store and that I would be paid anyway. (Note: grocery stores won't accept returns.)

Much of the driver support question was covered by text messages which I saved. Interestingly, later, the customer tipped me and apologized for not showing up. I saved all that along with a photo of the apartment complex.

The next day, I was deactivated for not abiding by the TOS for not delivering. I emailed them all the text messages including those from the customer and driver support along with screenshots and photos but to no avail.

But because the countries laws benefit the excessively rich, and the poor peoples' hard work to make the rich richer, means that these people have 0 protections whatsoever.

They are the second lowest economic class, the "can't even get W2 work". The lowest is 'homeless', who are already considered thrown away, societally speaking.

Only after a NYT reporter started poking around, of course. How many others don’t have that going for them?

A prime example of the modern day indentured servant: beholden to his creditors, subject to the whims of whoever pays him pennies for a dollars worth of work.