What is Instacart really charging? the breakdown

Come on dude, can't you add the 43% on the title ? Why do you have to make it clickbait?

$150 for $80 worth of groceries, wow.

When buying commodity items like most produce but in particular packaged goods, there's still an unsolved problem of "how much should I be paying for this?" and oftentimes I see even unit prices which are straight up miscalculated.

The problem seems compounded when shopping for this stuff online, when each individual item is so cheap, it takes too many clicks to realize how badly you are being ripped off.

I find even when grocery shopping online through a store's own site the prices are inflated over in-store. It compounds the anxiety over someone else picking low quality/old stock to the point where I won't grocery shop online as much as would really like to optimize the process.

I also find the menu system and scrolling lists of items an incredibly frustrating way to pick out the right gallon of milk.

I think the underlying fact is that it's extremely expensive for Instacart to provide their service.

I think an automated / lights out grocery store where you order through an app and drive by on the way home to pickup the food would be an order of magnitude more efficient. But you have to build the warehouse (like Amazon does) to allow robots to fill the order.

If you're paying for the overhead of food to be stocked on shelves nicely enough for picky customers to look at it, and then only after that point are you filling an online order, that's hugely wasteful.

While some people do get outraged by high margins, the main issue I see here is that they do pretend to publish their markup, but it's widely out of whack with reality. 63% may technically fit into "15%+", but it's highly misleading. They should just remove it.

I think it's just the degree. Instead of saying we charge 10% on gross plus a delivery fee of $x based on demand, they add margin to everything and double charge (service fee vs tip) for things people are unsure about. On the other hand, it is indeed a luxury service and people are free not to use it. The market will correct it if it needs correcting.

In the UK, this would never fly as pretty much every supermarket has home delivery with identical online v in store pricing + delivery fee. It's much more honest.