The effect of money is the opposite of this. You use it to save time. The poorer you are, the less your time costs effectively and the more things you do yourself, like going to the grocery store, no matter how far.
Instacart is a SNAP/EBT vendor, so clearly they have low income customers. Some people prefer online shopping because of the stigma of using benefits in-person. For others without reliable access to transportation, delivery might be the most reasonable option. Public transit also takes time that might be better spent with family, or at your job.
In the city I grew up in they had no busses until a local company paid for the first one simply to get the poorer employees to work reliably because it was impacting production.
There are still many places in America where you either walk or you own a car, period. When the car breaks down and you need parts.. you walk. Worse there are no sidewalks. When the snow is a foot deep you risk frostbite and hypothermia.
The reality is that the algorithmic prices are always higher than they'd be in store. InstaCart would never lower their prices below what's in the store, algorithmically or otherwise; they would have to foot the difference. Using software hides these price increases, especially when the nature of it means the customer won't be in the store to see the differences in real time. (They could enlist help but why would they even think to do that?)
It seems to be a reasonable option even though their grocery bill will (apparently) be about 7% higher. That could seem the same as prices rising; it's surely noticeable and will make them drop a couple items from their cart but they can still checkout. Their cost would remain consistent over time and with actual price increases while always being that barely significant amount more. All while they believe they know exactly how much their decision is costing them.
Many things can leave a person temporarily or permanently unable to fetch their own groceries. Many of those things happen to the poor more frequently. They at least have more severe consequences when a person is poor.
For example, a middle class person can just buy a new tire when one goes flat. A poor person may have to walk for a few paychecks.
> You just take the bus to the store, because you don’t pay extra money for someone to go there for you. You don’t have that money.
They said this in response to a comment comparing the cost/benefit of instacart vs overpriced shrinkflation products from Dollar General.
Neither alternative was starvation. The alternatives under discussion were Dollar General, Instacart, and the bus.
I pointed out that the bus is often not an option, because the person who advocated it seemed to be using it to dismiss the fact that instacart groceries from a real grocery store are cheaper than buying them from a place like Dollar General which is objectively true.
Personal time is a highly constrained resource: finite, non-renewable, non-storable and mutually exclusive. You can’t simply value someone’s personal time based upon their paid time. (Though people love to do this anyways…as if a poor person’s life time is objectively worth less than a richer person’s.)
Poor people often have less time available, less supply, than others due to longer transportation times as well as having more chores that they must complete by themselves.
For example, a person can be making $15 / hour and only have 4 hours of available waking personal time per day. If during those 4 hours they must complete all personal and household chores, as well as find some time for recuperating, then they would likely value those 4 hours as much more than $15 each.
Or considered another way: the value of the first hour in a day is not worth the same as the last hour. That last hour is valued according to the tasks that must be accomplished during that time and what is lost if the tasks are not successfully accomplished. And when under stress, the value can change drastically.