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Instacart is playing games with its workers’ pay

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Re: Instacart is playing games with its workers’ pay

#231

Post by felipelemos »

eridius wrote: post #197
dawnerd wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like even if they paid their delivery people a reasonable wage they'd still expect tips. Ive had movers that made over 50/hour not including the cost of materials/truck/etc ask for a tip. I was all for Uber being tip free until drivers started driving for Lyft which does tips in-app, and now all the drivers expect it. I've always felt this way with Pizza. Most places charge a delivery fee. That itself should b…

Just to be clear, for pizza places that charge a delivery fee, most of the time that does not go to the driver. You should still tip your driver.

And this fee is paying who for what?

Re: Instacart is playing games with its workers’ pay

#232

Post by jrs235 »

grandalf wrote: post #35
lloydde wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Star ratings allow Uber to compensate top performers without creating an inconvenient friction point for users. Uber drivers with a high rating get paid more?

If they don't it's a big mistake by Uber. But at least the infrastructure is in place for collecting detailed ratings and feedback.

My under standing was if your star rating is too low then you lose your job as an Uber driver. They use it as a stick not a carrot.

Re: Instacart is playing games with its workers’ pay

#233

Post by martinald »

qqg3 wrote: post #229
mattmanser wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, you can look over the pond to find out why. In the UK, which is much less car focused, we've had a successful instacart equivalent, Ocado, for a decade. They're presently turning over about £1 billion per year ($1.25 billion) [1]. Market cap on today's market is £1.5 billion ($1.85 billion)[2]. Now all the major supermarkets home deliver and have for 5+ years. There's been a massive shift in the big chains' sto…

What you might not know? Ocado has built the backend for a lot of those major supermarkets offering online shopping. Another revenue stream for them as they are shopping the technology abroad too

That's not really true. They do it for Morrisons but noone else. They haven't been able to sell the technology abroad yet, and the CEO commented in their last annual report how this was a big disappointment.

To be honest though, the technology is superb. Compared to Tesco, Asda or Sainsburys, deliveries are always bang on time and I have only out of dozens of order had one item that was out of stock, which is much better than the competition who always have to substitute random items in.

Re: Instacart is playing games with its workers’ pay

#234

Post by throwaway360181 »

nathanaldensr wrote: post #36

When are we as a society going to tire of company executives feigning stupidity and ignorance when it comes to these very deliberate actions ? All these executives--and likely all the developers, too--know exactly why these business model and app changes were made. The reasons given in the article are completely accurate. It can be boiled down to this: Money > People.

> the developers

No, blame management. Not until programmers have a union masquerading as a professional association that backs us up, like the AMA or the ABA, and we enjoy much greater autonomy and a much stronger position from which to say "no," should we be made to shoulder the blame along side management.

Re: Instacart is playing games with its workers’ pay

#235

Post by martinald »

mattmanser wrote: post #228
tyre wrote: post #8

They have tens of thousands of customers, yet are worth multiple billions of dollars (valued at $2bn in 2015.) That's just incredible. Let's say they have 100k customers who each use the service every week. That's 5.2m orders per year. Let's say $100 per order, to be generous. At a 10% service fee, that's $50m for a two-year-old 40x revenue multiple. Before paying their contracted workforce. This does not make sense.…

Well, you can look over the pond to find out why. In the UK, which is much less car focused, we've had a successful instacart equivalent, Ocado, for a decade. They're presently turning over about £1 billion per year ($1.25 billion) [1]. Market cap on today's market is £1.5 billion ($1.85 billion)[2]. Now all the major supermarkets home deliver and have for 5+ years. There's been a massive shift in the big chains' sto…

Tesco has actually been doing this forever. There is a mention of them doing online shopping in 1986!

But they actually launched the product proper, in 1996, where they would give you a CD-ROM and it would then sync the diff of products available when it connected. Very ahead of its time - nearly 20 years.

The US grocery market is so far behind on this it's pretty crazy.

Re: Instacart is playing games with its workers’ pay

#236

Post by vinceguidry »

marknutter wrote: post #185
vinceguidry wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Trump is the personification of the outrage over illegal immigration, crime, bad trade deals, and the Neocon (globalist) wing of the Republican party. Exactly, it's the system working for the other side of the country. They didn't have nearly as good of a grassroots outreach mechanism, they finally built one. The two sides cannot agree on what justice means. That's ultimately a national question and so it had to be…

I'm curious as to why you think the world is moving towards liberalism.

Ultimately it's because of the Internet. Sharing of ideas, remixing them, iterating on them, that's all the province of liberalism. Holding on to tradition, resisting modernization, that's conservatism. Liberalism is the rising tide raising all boats. It's always happening, everywhere, behind the scenes, in people's minds. Even the most conservative person has liberal ideas.

Liberalism is imperative, conservatism only impairs. You can have individuals, groups, communities, industries, cities, provinces, countries, even whole blocs of countries espousing conservatism, but the natural trend is towards idea evolution and that's liberalism. It might take a long, circuitous route to get there, but when you take the totality of the whole world, and the logic of ideation, that's where it's going.

Re: Instacart is playing games with its workers’ pay

#237

Post by cmdrfred »

coldtea wrote: post #226
closeparen wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What is the market for +10% on groceries and basic necessities? People who live in the suburbs without cars. Cities are successfully discouraging car ownership by making parking scarce near downtown offices and even the suburban transit stations that lead to downtown offices. At the same time, cities aren't permitting the construction of dense, walkable neighborhoods, at least not fast enough to make them affordable…

> People who live in the suburbs without cars. All 10 of them?

How do they get to work? If they don't work, with what money do they buy food?

Re: Instacart is playing games with its workers’ pay

#238

Post by ProblemFactory »

chii wrote: post #220
IanCal wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For value, yes. If not, perhaps you don't really value your leisure time at $1000/hr.

your value isn't set by your own standards - your value is what someone else will pay you for your time! I.e., the opportunity cost of leisure is the value of leisure.

It's more complex than that.

People on salary earn a fixed amount per month - they don't get paid extra if they work an hour longer in the evening instead of shopping.

People on most hourly jobs have their schedule set by their manager. They can't pick up an extra hour of work unless their manager has some to offer, and not at the time of their own choosing.

People working on their own businesses have an even less direct correlation between extra hour worked and extra income.

Only the very few people who do remote freelance work on an hourly basis have the flexibility to decide between going shopping for an hour or doing billable work for an hour.

For everyone else, the opportunity cost of leisure time is close to 0, but they might be willing to pay for services for other reasons.

Re: Instacart is playing games with its workers’ pay

#239

Post by bb611 »

felipelemos wrote: post #231
eridius wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to be clear, for pizza places that charge a delivery fee, most of the time that does not go to the driver. You should still tip your driver.

And this fee is paying who for what?

Profits

Re: Instacart is playing games with its workers’ pay

#240

Post by amykhar »

mikeash wrote: post #105
dawnerd wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like even if they paid their delivery people a reasonable wage they'd still expect tips. Ive had movers that made over 50/hour not including the cost of materials/truck/etc ask for a tip. I was all for Uber being tip free until drivers started driving for Lyft which does tips in-app, and now all the drivers expect it. I've always felt this way with Pizza. Most places charge a delivery fee. That itself should b…

The solution is to pay them better and forbid them from taking tips. Make it clear to customers that it's not even allowed, let alone expected. Unfortunately, I don't think tipping culture is going away any time soon.

I believe Amazon did this with Amazon Fresh. The tip option in the app went away, and when I asked the delivery person, he said their pay had been increased and they were good. No tip required. He said it with a smile on his face, but who knows if he was really dying inside.
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