Instacart Doesn't Want ‘No For An Answer

Dozens of workers say the company’s app hectors them to take on grocery deliveries that aren’t worth their time, and that it doesn’t stop there.

- Josh Eidelson

When Instacart Inc.’s eponymous grocery delivery app gets a new order, it typically alerts a nearby “full- service shopper,” its term for the worker who gathers and delivers the groceries, by sending the order to the worker’s phone with a bright green “ACCEPT” button and a repetitive pinging sound. But even if that shopper—who ostensibly has the flexibility to reject a gig—decides the latest one isn’t worth the time and effort, the on-demand food delivery platform usually doesn’t offer an option to decline.

Workers are forced to entirely mute their phone, close the app, or sit through about four minutes of that strange pinging, which many say sounds like a submarine’s sonar and some compare to a time bomb. Those who wait it out sometimes wind up having to do it all over again when the same job pops back up in their queue. To avoid that, people often have taken jobs they didn’t want, says Eric Vallett, an Instacart worker in Buffalo who’s tapped ACCEPT more than once to avoid another series of pings. “You just want to get away from that sound,” he says.

The four-minute sonic barrage is among a slew of tactics Instacart uses to push workers to handle low-paying tasks they otherwise might reject, according to interviews with dozens of shoppers. They say the company has hounded them with phone calls, text messages, and threatening in-app messages, and that it quietly but explicitly punishes them for rejecting undesirable tasks by limiting their gig options and income. “We should have a right to say ‘I don’t want it’ without being penalized,” says Theresa Thornton, who shops for Instacart in Missouri City, Texas.