Yesterday, Instacart shoppers published an open letter to Instacart regarding untenable working conditions and a lack of benefits. They cited five demands from the company. Upon further research, it looks like this is congruent with years of shopper complaints about exploitative practices. These are the shoppers demands:

1. Pay shoppers by order, not batch. “If we shopped a single order,” they write, “the base pay would be $7, but if we shopped three orders at once, the base pay would be $7 for the lot.”

2. Re-introduce item commission. “[Nearly] every order now pays $7 regardless of the size. A single two item order pays $7, and a triple 50 item order pays $7.”

3. Reform the rating system, which “unfairly [punishes] shoppers for issues outside their control.”

4. Provide occupational death benefits.

5. Raise the default tip to 10 percent, up from the current 5 percent.

Shoppers report that because Instacart hasn’t listened to their demands in the years of complaints, shoppers are asking the community to delete the app off our phones.

In the past, I’ve written about Instacart’s convenience during my cancer treatment when grocery shopping was an unimaginable task. Since the pandemic, however, shoppers also report unsafe working conditions. This is a classic case of people at the top exploiting the labor of people just trying to feed their families. And so now I ask you to do the same. Let’s show the people sitting in their ivory towers eating the finest food that we won’t support exploitative labor practices.

Thanks for reading!

xMaegan