I am not a big fan of our tipping culture but these are special circumstances and I am leaving the higher than normal suggested tips. If people can select which orders to fill based on the promised tip then that tip is an offer and you should not be able to reduce the tip unless there is a good reason.
Wow. That’s horrible. The two times I’ve used Instacart since we’ve been sheltering at home, I’ve used that facility to increase my tip.
My first order, I didn’t notice the tip on the order, and it defaulted to 5%. I increased it to 20% after the delivery. The second time I forgot to change the default before submitting my order, so I had to increase it afterwards, too. And both my orders were handled fine even though they thought they were going to get a chintzy 5% tip.
My instacart tip is about 5%. It’s not chincy. They can take a while to deliver.
The delivery is not time sensitive like it is for hot food. I want my food in the next 20-30 minutes.
So my tip is about 20% for hot food delivery these days with no real cap. I usually $5 for delivery unless my order requires a special trip like when i order 10 buckets of chicken or a dozen pizzas. I figure anything more than that and i would rather just go get it myself. That is not true these days so i pay more.
Interestingly enough, I read a Reddit post today from someone who claims they enter a large tip, zero it out in the app, and tip the driver in cash. They give the full tip amount but the driver gets to keep the full thing (vs. the service taking a cut). When the company looks at their data, all they see is that the customer offered and then revoked a large tip.
But maybe the Reddit poster read the same article and came up with a great idea for a fake thread. 
It would be interesting to know how many of these situations a) leave no tip, b) leave a smaller cash tip, and c) leave the full cash tip. I’m not wearing glasses rosy enough to assume it’s majority full cash tip, just sharing a different possible explanation for some of the cases.
Does that Reddit poster know something I don’t? Because I use Instacart and it says right in the app that the shopper gets 100% of the tip - the company does not take a cut. Do they think or know the company is lying?
I’m for Instacart putting in a two stage system. A bid system that is a guarantee (we can’t get a pickup scheduled right now - too few drivers, too many orders) that will drive more people to working for instacart and choosing the high bid orders (and yes, that gives the wealthy an advantage on grocery delivery, but it also puts money in the pockets of the driver) and an after the fact (but for ease you can put it in before and change it later) tip option…for example. its worth it for Karen to bid $20 for a grocery deliver order - the driver gets that guaranteed, and if the order is well done, tip on top of that (or not). And a customer rating system for drivers that allows them to pick and choose their customers based off prior ratings - you might have to bid up if you rate your shoppers low to get anyone to put up with your rating someone low who couldn’t get you your preferred brand of toilet paper right now.
Not sure how I dyslexically mis-read the OP title as Instafart Cake Tippers, but there ya go.
Sounds like bullshit. Some people are being horrible and selfish.
This is definitely not in the driver’s interest, but I agree it’s in the customer’s interest.
Here’s the thing. I’ve been doing GH/DD delivery part time while I’m in school. The amount DD/GH pay us is very little, it basically only covers our cost. Someone attempted to quantify what DD paid their drivers and concluded that, after costs, DD pays their drivers $1.45 per hour. That seems a little conservative to me, but in the ballpark. More than waitstaff or pizza delivery drivers, we’re pretty much working only for tips.
This is a shitty system. There are a lot of people who do not tip, and DD/GH/other services do not pay enough to make up for it, to the point where you can literally lose money for doing an offer. In fact, I would estimate that at least 25% of the offers on the DD/GH platforms are literally money losing - I would pay more in car costs than they delivery would pay me, and that’s ignoring the time I’m wasting.
So, given that we only make tips, we pretty much need to see those tips up front in order to make an informed decision about what to do, otherwise every single time I’m taking a gamble on whether I’d lose money by working to fulfill an offer. The job would become miserable instantly if I were forced to do work and then hope that I got paid for it instead of losing money for doing it.
Of course that also makes sort of an illogical system. If tipping is a reward/incentive for good service, then it doesn’t make sense to pre-tip before you see what sort of service you get. So I’m not suggesting that pre-tipping is a logical system, but so long as these companies are designed to basically not pay you and you only work for tips, it would be completely unreasonable for the drivers to not know ahead of time what they’ll get paid for a job.
It does seem more logical to me to treat it like a bid. You’re trying to make your order worth someone’s time so they’ll accept it.
I think the whole tipping system is stupid pretty much across the board and is a uniquely American failure, as the rest of the world seems to be more sane about it. It becomes even more absurd when translated to the gig economy. I would prefer DD/GH just charged the customer more and paid the driver an amount that’s actually worth their time rather than foisting the costs off to the voluntary generosity of the customer.
But gig jobs, especially something like instacart, have it worse off in this regard than traditional tipped positions like waitstaff. A waiter probably has like 8 tables going at once, and so if they get stiffed by a table, that definitely does suck, but it only ends up being a fraction of the work they’re doing. Delivery drivers can only serve one customer at a time, and if the customer stiffs them, they wasted their entire 20-60 minutes. Additionally, the waiter doesn’t incur costs to do his job, just his time. For delivery people, car costs are substantial and very real and we can actually lose money doing a job without being tipped.
Instacart is absolutely the worst with this, because in case you didn’t know, it’s not like the grocery store pickup where they create the order for you and bring it to your car. The instacart driver themselves has to go through the store and pick up all your items. They can easily spend 15 minutes driving to the store, 30 minutes at the store completing the order, 15 minutes to drive to you, and another 5-10 lugging your groceries around (and if it’s anything like my job, somehow everyone lives on the third floor of a giant labryinthine apartment complex). I think instacart pays them somewhere around $6 for this. They probably incur $2-4 just in car costs during the process, so without tips, they’d working for like $2/hr and doing quite a bit of work.
We need that total payment up front to be able to make a reasonable decision on what work to do. It’s stupid that our tipping culture has lead to an even more illogical “pre-tipping” culture for gig delivery, but it’s necessary so long as we’re going to hold onto this tipping mentality as a whole.
I did some looking around and found this from two weeks ago:
Either they didn’t go far enough when they removed control from the customer or they introduced a new problem.
Not being familiar with InstaCart I have to ask, is the delivery person also the one who filled the order, or do they simply pick up a box that somebody at the store filled?
The delivery person fills the order.
When you work for Instacart, you can choose to be just a shopper (part-time employee; customer picks up order), or shopper and delivery person (independent contractor).
Well that’s all fine but how do you get to screw (the poor) people over? Oh!, the royal family. Got it, carry on 
I can testify that Instacart is actively working on this. My bank flagged recent Instacart charges as fraudulent. For some reason I’ve been using them a lot lately, and they wanted to confirm this. As soon as the payment was stopped, Instacart froze my account. It’s cleared up now, but I admit to a moment of panic.
That was apparently NOT always the case.
Doordash got into trouble for some similar behavior.
I’m curious: Does an InstaCart shopper get to pick what orders s/he shops for? Or just “who’s next” on the list? Does the shopper even see the planned tip amount beforehand?
Does the shopper also do the delivery (if you’re doing delivery vs pickup)? If not, how is the tip (or non-tip) split?
Don’t get me wrong: if the shopper sees he’ll get a great tip, and does his best, and then gets ripped off by having the tip zeroed out, it’s really, really, SCUMMY behavior and I hope the shoppers get the opportunity to refuse service in the future.
Us: we do put a tip on our delivery order (Peapod, not InstaCart) and we also give cash. If the government doesn’t find out about that cash… oh well.
nvm
drachillix has recently started to work for Instacart and he’s opened an AMA thread here. He could probably answer at least some of these questions.