Is there a reason why instacart even allows you to pick orders? It seems like this exploit can be stopped just by only letting shoppers look at the first few items of the queue, and limiting the amount of skips.
That could be construed as Instacart assigning orders to their shoppers which would likely make them employees eligible for benefits, something they want to avoid at all costs. This may already be the case in CA regardless of what they do, but they definitely want to avoid paying any benefits for their workers in any state where this is not yet currently the case.
Definitely this. They don't care who gets the orders as long as they're gotten, and assigning the work to people rather than letting people pick from a pool makes them look more like an employer/dispatcher rather than a broker.
> construed as Instacart assigning orders to their shoppers
Uber & Lyft assign rides to drivers. [You can still cancel them after they ping you, but it's discouraged.] It seems to me like it works extremely well overall compared to what Instacart is doing.
Grocery shopping is a bit different from just picking up a food order. You may only have the time (or desire) to do smaller orders and not want to deal with larger more time consuming ones. Or maybe you don't want to drive farther to certain stores etc....
Sure, but all of those could be addressed by allowing setting available-for criteria rather than browse-and-select.
Or they could just not display tips in advance; since tips can be altered after delivery, it's misleading to treat them as part of the bargain of accepting a delivery anyway, advance entry should be viewed as a convenience for the orderer to enter a default amount based one expected service, not an inducement.
If the tips aren't visible in advance, bots can't snatch “lucrative” orders, because they can't find them.
I agree, I think showing tips prior to an order is absolutely stupid. I did Skip the Dishes delivery on the side and you could see the tip before you delivered to the customer. It always seemed silly to me to be able to know what was tipped. What if I had a big order and no tip? Honestly even as a customer I don't like this because you feel pressured to tip otherwise be afraid they will do something to your food. It would be like going to a restaurant and having to choose your tip before they did anything and have them know what you chose to gave them. It just is stupid.
