Instacart shoppers say they face unforgiving metrics: 'It's a very easy job to lose'
Five days a week, Ryan Hartson scours the picked-over aisles of Mariano’s in Chicago to fill grocery delivery orders for Instacart. He clocks in for his shift exactly on the hour — if he's even five minutes late, he'll receive a "reliability incident." Within four minutes he must accept any incoming orders; any longer, and he'll be kicked off the shift and risk getting an incident. Three incidents in a week, and he's at risk of termination. "It's a very easy job to lose," Hartson said.
To avoid missing orders, Hartson schedules his bathroom visits — after four hours of work, the app notifies him that he has earned a 10-minute paid break. Meanwhile, Instacart managers use the app to see if he's running behind on his orders.
Metrics define the experience of Instacart's part-time workforce. Measured weekly for employees such as Harston are the number of reliability incidents, the number of seconds it takes to pick each item and the percentage of customers with whom they correspond. Some former and current employees say 5% to 20% of shoppers in a store can be fired weekly.
Even in the data-driven tech world, Instacart stands out for its metrics-oriented culture, interviews with more than 30 current and former employees, as well as documents and recordings reviewed by The Times, reveal. This drive toward productivity helps Instacart's profit margins, a vital step for a start-up that recorded its first-ever monthly profit in April, as the COVID-19 pandemic heightened demand for grocery delivery.
Instacart says it has eased enforcement of certain metrics during the pandemic, but shoppers say company policies often ignore the realities of the job, leaving them in constant fear of termination over matters that are out of their control.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/instacart-shoppers-face-unforgiving-metrics-130043642.html
