by Cristina |
Last Updated: April 8, 2018 It was a sad day. The day I realized that I could no longer use Instacart. This cuts deep. I am the person my entire apartment building silently judges behind my back for the amount of times Instacart gets delivered. I get the phone call from the front desk “Cristina, your groceries are here, again.”
I know what it looks like. I just didn’t care. I’m lazy. There you see, I took the judgment right out of your mouth. I’m completely and utterly aware of how lazy I am. However I thought Instacart was justifiable.
I am a mother of three, and live in an apartment building where taking groceries up is not always easy. Yes, my kids are in school now. Yes I could go on a morning after the gym, but I just got so used to this.
I was also doing the math correctly, so I thought. I thought I had understood that if you calculate the Taxes and the Fees each delivery it’s only about $10-$12 and if you pay for the Membership ($120 for the year) you are only paying the fees and the tip each time. This is not cheap, however if you factor in that it saves me about an hour and a half of shopping and the headache of getting everything up into the apartment it just seemed to equal out.
Considering how much work I could get done. I told everyone I knew, Instacart is the way to go. I’m so in love with it. The app is so amazing. Well you know what they say…. Love hurts.
Today after receiving my groceries, I unpacked everything, and went to rate the delivery. I gave it 4 stars because my milk carton was damaged and can’t stand up straight, but my shopper was great. I gave my driver an $8 tip and closed it out.
Then there it was, my delivery driver left the receipt in my bag. I found that Publix only charged Instacart $162.40, and there was an ambiguous $11.99 Grocery Non Food item charge. When I opened the Instacart App to try and figure out what that was, I saw Instacart had charged me $193 for this transaction. As you can imagine I was not pleased. Who am I kidding I was f%&*#@%g pissed.
I took my 8 deep breaths and called them to see what was going on. I got the nicest customer service rep, Dylan. Who in the nicest way possible told me [I’m going to paraphrase this. Dylan I hope I do you justice] that Instacart charges more for groceries from Publix as their cost of doing business. To which I replied, “that doesn’t make sense.” Publix is not charging you more for the groceries, it’s just Instacart charging more. “Why” I asked.
We aren’t talking about my groceries just costing an extra $5-10 we are talking about $40. When you do that calculation $40 x every time I’ve used instacart over the last year and it comes out to $1,920 in the last year. This is on top of the “member fee” I paid, on top of the tips, and on top of that service fee I sometimes forget to waive. By the way if you use instacart they hit you with a 20% service fee on each transaction that if you don’t expressly waived it gets tacked on.
Things I could do with $1920:
- Take my family on a pretty nice beach weekend
- Buy a designer handbag
- Sponsor 5-10 classrooms on donorschoose.org
- Buy a piece of furniture for my girl’s bedroom that they/I have been needing/wanting
- Most importantly, dDone my own damn grocery shopping an additional 6-7 times for the same price
Holy shit. For the first time ever I am disgusted by my laziness. I don’t like things that make me face my flaws head on. I tell Dylan I am not blaming him, this isn’t his fault. He is convinced he is just explaining this poorly, that I should speak to the manager.
So the manager comes on the phone, and I ask him to explain to me the non-grocery item. To paraphrase “Sometimes the driver includes someone else’s items in the checkout. That’s why we never want them to leave the receipt inside the bags. OH IS THAT WHY? I’m starting to unravel at this point.
I say, so then what you’re saying is, since all the rest of these items were actually mine, my cost for these groceries was actually $150 and so that’s just an additional $12 that I paid to Instacart. So really, my “upcharge” as they so lovingly called it for this transaction was $40 plus the fees and the tip and the tax.
Oh but, Cristina, we say it really clearly on the app that we have higher than in store prices. You see that image, you see that teeny tiny little white lettered warning, I should have known. This is my fault. I have to be honest I had noticed that before, but again figured it was a harmless upcharge. Not $40 per transaction.
I told the manager to kindly review my account. To note how many times I’ve used instacart this year, and then to note I will never use Instacart again in my life. There is no convenience in stealing people’s money. People who are just trying to feed their families. People who are too busy with work or other obligations.
I would love to tell you that all of this has inspired me to get off my ass and go to the grocery store myself going forward. But I’m not a liar. I’m probably going to Amazon or Shipt whoever will have me.
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