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I have also driven for Instacart and can answer questions if it’s okay with the OP. I worked the Austin zone as a combined full service shopper/delivery-only guy for I think a little over a year and hated every second of it. Unlike some other zones, mine didn’t have guaranteed hourly pay when I worked there, and to make matters worse the zone itself was loving HUGE; I had A LOT of batches where the customer and the store I had to go to were a 45+ minute drive apart from each other (in Austin TX traffic, no less). This was especially bad on delivery-only batches, both because DO batches pay the worst, and because most DOs go to several different customers, which you have to deliver to IN A CERTAIN ORDER, and they don’t tell you where each customer lives until after you’ve accepted the batch and gotten to that customer’s place in line. That last part doesn’t sound so bad, except that in practice, you ended up getting tons of DO batches where the first customers on your delivery list were right near the store you had to pick up from... and then the last one was CLEAR ACROSS TOWN, an aforementioned 45+ minute drive from the last customer. I had several of these where the last customer took me over an hour to get to. It was extremely bullshit. A lot of people including me tried to avoid doing DO batches altogether, but any time you refused a batch of any kind IC would give you a “reliability incident”, which if you got a certain number of (I think 5) in a certain timespan, the company would make it a lot harder for you to get hours to work, which cut into your pay a lot. To try to mitigate this, a bunch of people in my zone eventually started doing DO batches and only delivering to the customers near the respective stores, and then refusing to do the across-town last deliveries by making up some excuse why they couldn’t do it to try and avoid getting an incident (or just straight-up telling IC to go gently caress themselves and taking an incident anyway because gently caress that poo poo). Sadly, I don’t think IC ever learned a lesson from any of this; as far as I know the clear-across-town batch poo poo is still happening in at least the Austin zone and probably a whole bunch of others. It also didn’t help that IC actively hosed over its employees constantly. When I started working for them, we were told that IC was moving away from customer tips as its primary source of payment for drivers, in favor of paying based on the number of items in full-service shopping batches and upping the pay per delivery for DO batches. Apparently, this DRASTICALLY reduced the amount IC drivers got payed, because both of those systems amounted to less money than drivers had been making previously from tips. While IC did keep tipping around as an option... for reasons I still do not understand to this day, they deliberately redesigned their system to make it harder for customers to tip, mostly by hiding the tipping option in the app and I think actually misleading people into thinking that some other fee was already a tip. Unfortunately it’s been so long since I left that I forget exactly what they did to make tipping harder (I know they hid the option in the app, but the part about them misleading people may not be 100% correct), but I have a PDF for a flyer someone in an IC drivers Facebook group made for us to hand out to customers explaining the situation that goes into better detail on it. I’ll post a link to it here later. As for why I stuck around for so long despite all of IC’s bullshit, I was in college (still technically am but that’s another story), I needed a job where I could set my own hours, I was really desperate for money of ANY kind to pay rent, and I didn’t think I had enough time, work experience, or good grades to do anything better paying at the time (actually I’m kinda still not sure about those last two even now...... my life sucks and I hate myself  ).
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Oct 15, 2019 06:03
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boar guy posted:for sure Thanks! I will say that from reading your OP, your experiences with IC and mine seem to be a lot different. Not sure how much of that is due to differences in how our zones work or if IC changed some poo poo since I left, but I did notice a few points you mentioned that didn’t really sync up with how things were for me that I’d like to touch on a bit later. boar guy posted:edit: Gei, in your experience, are the people who just shop and don't drive like...super weird? or is it just here If you mean the people who put together the delivery only orders and put them on the shelves for us to take, I never really had any interaction with them personally, but I want to say I heard some other drivers talking about them every now and then and basically saying they were assholes. boar guy posted:edit again: as a shopper, here's my advice to you as a customer 1000% agree with ALL OF THIS!! I’d also like to add to that first point by saying that, from my experience, produce is by far the most annoying, frustrating, and time-consuming part of a batch for a shopper, and we VASTLY prefer batches with very little or no produce at all over ones with a whole bunch of it. Not just because they’re easier, but because they take less time for us to fill, which is actually REALLY IMPORTANT for shoppers because IC uses the shoppers’ shop times to determine who gets the better, higher-paying batches. Shoppers that finish faster get more full-service shopping batches (which pay the most) and fewer delivery-only batches (which pay peanuts and, as I mentioned earlier, often force the shopper to drive outrageous distances to make deliveries, which burns both gas money and time we COULD be spending on other/better-paying batches). Because of all that, and this is one thing I did different from the OP, I always shopped for produce first to get it out of the way, because it seemed to shorten my shopping times a bit. The only parts of a batch that can potentially take longer than produce are the meat/seafood/deli/prepared foods counter stuff, and that depends a lot on whether or not you have to wait in line to get what you need, which you very often do. I’ve had many batches where I came VERY close to finishing in under my allotted shop time, only to go over because I had to wait in line at a counter to get something. I really wish stores would let IC shoppers cut in line to get what they need, because waiting in those lines hurts our shop times BAD, and like I said above, worse shop times lead to worse batches lead to worse pay for shoppers. I. M. Gei fucked around with this message at 07:56 on Oct 15, 2019 |
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Oct 15, 2019 07:31
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Anyway I’ll post more about my experiences and stories with IC a bit later. Right now it’s like 2:15 AM where I am and I have to wake up early for a doctor’s appointment. One thing I will say before I punch out for the night is that I’m still in the private IC shoppers group on Facebook for the Austin area, which is chock full of posts about how much IC sucks and stories about rear end in a top hat customers. I’ll probably post some stuff from there in this thread (with names and poo poo censored, of course) unless the mods tell me not to for whatever reason. There’s more than likely an identical IC shopper Facebook group (or several) for every IC zone out there, and if any of you reading this work for IC and aren’t already a member of the group(s) for your zone (this includes you, boar guy), then I highly recommend joining because they can be pretty helpful sometimes.
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Oct 15, 2019 08:16
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boar guy posted:this is about a $400 order at costco (thanks, assholes at some church, pretty christlike of you to make me carry that water in and not tip) I never got a single full-service batch at Costco when I worked for IC. I only ever got DOs, and they were always some of the worst/most annoying batches for me because there was almost always too much poo poo for me to fit inside my tiny rear end Corolla, so I had to keep calling what IC called “Shopper Happiness” (basically IC’s employee help line) to get one or two orders taken off each batch just so I could fit everything in my car. And because the Costcos in Austin are all way the gently caress on the far edges of town so it was always a long rear end drive from there to the customers’ houses. I. M. Gei fucked around with this message at 02:20 on Oct 18, 2019 |
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Oct 18, 2019 02:12
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