For the first time on Saturday night I put in an order and no one wanted to pick it up. I couldn’t understand why.
I had left a top tip and it was from a store that I had purchased from before. So I turned to Gemini to try to understand why this happened.
It suggested that on a busy night in NYC the drivers wouldn’t want to pick up a large order and instead might optimize their time by picking up faster/easier smaller orders. I asked what I should do and it just suggested to wait. Here is what blew my mind. It said that the platform Instacart will add $1 dollar every 15 minutes to entice drivers to pick it up. It took 2 hours for someone to be interested, so that means that Instacart had to raise it 8 times or $8 dollars for someone to be interested.
Why is this important? Instacart and other delivery apps argue that tips are not salary, but if drivers can’t afford to take an order and optimize for tips to survive then it clearly is a salary. They had to had at least $8 to the % amount that I had added already for someone to be interested in doing it. So clearly food/other delivery models are flawed.
I wonder how much of this is due to gas prices, and how much is due to people pulling back from gig work. I have noticed that gig drivers are always different, even when I purchase from the same stores. Clearly this isn’t a long-term line of work, which raises the question about its model of business.
One of Gemini suggestions was to add a note to the order that I would pay them additionally in cash, but if I am giving them a tip %, then it is really hard to justify giving them more money just to deliver the product. If no one one picks up the orders in the future, then its clear that Instacart needs to change its methods to support long-term employees. Or just like Amazon, people will refuse to work for them and then they will have a hiring problem.