Shopping and delivering high-earning orders is a priority for Instacart shoppers, perhaps now more than ever. But recently, those orders require shopping for hundreds of items or driving over an hour to deliver them, if not both, according to reporting from Business Insider.
According to some shoppers, having to invest that extra time especially hurts in the wake of Instacart’s decision to cut minimum base pay on orders to $4, down from its previous minimum of $7.
There are still orders that shoppers can pick up which have higher payouts of $10 or more, but lately these orders come with higher and higher demands on the shopper’s time.
One shopper in Virginia told Insider that she recently passed on an order with a $36 payout. It would have involved shopping for only a few items at a Food Lion grocery store, then driving them 72 miles to the customer — a trip that the shopper estimated would’ve taken at least an hour and a half.
Instacart said that “an extremely small percentage of batches” involve delivering orders with over 100 items or driving more than 50 miles to customers. “It is not accurate to say that these types of orders are common on our platform,” the company told Insider.
Instacart told Insider on Monday that shoppers have control over which batches they choose to shop, and that it pays according to the complexity of each order. “We know that not all orders are created equal, and we want to make sure shopper earnings reflect the effort needed to fulfill each batch,” Daniel Danker, chief product officer at Instacart, said.
As a result of Instacart’s lower base pay, some shoppers have said that they are looking for traditional jobs or considering working for other delivery services like DoorDash.
