Instacart has raised another $200M at a $4.2B valuation

- Their quality of workers have gone down. I don't know if they have just lowered the bar for who they hire, or if the workers are too focused on competing orders that they just don't care anymore. I'm not exactly sure.

For example, in the app there is a setting option you (as a user) can set to explicitly request a phone call me if there is any replacements to confirm them. In the past year, I don't think any workers have followed this setting. And I understand that is maybe because Instacart has added some of that functionality in app, but that doesn't really work all the time. I have also recently had more and more Instacart workers who will make the "replacement" requests in the last 2 seconds of shopping so you have no ability to actually "approve/deny" the things they pick. I believe they do this on purpose so they don't have to do as much work trying to communicate with their user they are shopping for. It probably shaves off time they have for completing other orders. So, by this "evil" tactic I've seen them start to use more and more, you can't actually control the replacements. You just get what they assumed you may want for the replacement. This is incredibly frustrating as a user to have happen to your order. Instacart has been good at refunding me for the bad replacements, but if they would have just called (like I marked in the app), we could have resolved the issue in store, and it would be all good. I don't understand why Instacart still has this setting if no workers are going to follow it anymore. They need to get this sorted out. Either informing their workers, or forcing app users to explicitly approve/deny in app before it closes that opportunity.

- Their up-sell fees have gotten outrageously greedy. It seems they are just rounding up to the highest potential possible and then charging that. They are transparent that some stores have higher prices, I understand that, but it's frustrating when certain items are way too up-priced. Meat being a perfect example. If you just want to get 1 ribeye steak, the app will say it will be $20, but then when you get the piece of meat it will still have the price label on it saying it was say $8. Instacart doesn't do any price adjustment to factor that and just charges $20, unless you contact their customer support and complain. On top of that, last time their customer support wouldn't even change it until I complained on Twitter. Then they finally took care of it.

- They used to give debit/credit card refunds for mistakes. Now they just give you a credit to your next order. I absolutely HATE this practice that companies sometimes do. It's so anti-consumer. You can't call it a refund if I'm forced to use your service again to actually be redeemed. That's a credit, not a refund. I don't get why they changed to this model, other than to speculate that their poor customer service has bit them in the butt so it's easier to give the user "monopoly" money to be forced to come back to use it, rather than just giving them a true refund. I'm not sure.

Those are just a few things that I've started to notice way more frequently. And I'll be 100% clear, this has all happened within the last year. I had 0 problems until the past year. I have no clue why it took such a dramatic fall. In the past year, there hasn't been a SINGLE order where I haven't had to contact customer support to fix something. And it's getting obvious that even their support is caring less and less about helping. Like making me have to go as far as get "social media justice" for them to fix their problems.

It's a bad trend I've seen. I'm optimistic that they can turn it around, and hopefully this money can help with that. I will not be renewing my Instacart Express this year, that's for sure. Will probably give them a few orders to redeem themselves after that and see. If it's still poor service, they will have lost a loyal customer all because of poor quality/scaling. But I'm also just 1 user. I get everyone may have different experiences.

For someone in the position of Walmart, and with the many startups that doing delivery, it seems realistic.

As for why do i think Amazon will win the high end? really, the biggest reason is that it's Amazon. But yes, that's not a good enough reason, but still, they win an awful lot.

But maybe there's a chance for instacart to win the higher end, especially by offering the largest variety any merchant can offer.

i was mainly noting the source for markups as we cannot tell you that delta -- it's up to the stores to tell us what they want to charge online. we do want to be as transparent as possible! ("possible" being the operative word here)