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Friday, March 22, 2024

Instacart Workers Are Still Waiting for Those Safety Supplies

Even during a pandemic, people still need food. On Instacart, orders have surged to an all-time high in recent weeks as its workforce of 350,000 “shoppers” ferry groceries between stores and American households. Each trip puts those workers at an increased risk of coming in contact with the new coronavirus; some grocery store employees have described their workplace as a “war zone.”

In March, Instacart workers staged a nationwide strike, demanding sick leave, hazard pay, and basic disinfection supplies, which have become a costly out-of-pocket expense for gig workers who have repeatedly complained about low pay. Instacart ignored those demands, except for one: On April 2, it agreed to fashion its shoppers with complimentary “health and safety kits,” each containing a reusable cloth face mask, a bottle of hand sanitizer, and a forehead thermometer. Workers are limited to one kit each.

But two weeks later, Instacart workers say the kits still haven’t come. WIRED spoke to more than a dozen workers, most of whom asked not to use their full names out of fear of having their accounts deactivated for speaking to the press. They describe a dizzying process just to request kits, with little communication from Instacart about how to place an order or when, if at all, the company would send the supplies.

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The kits had to be ordered through carrotswag.com, Instacart’s online store. (The company logo is a carrot.) Workers say they struggled with the ordering process. At first the kits were available for “pre-order,” but the site later said they were “out of stock,” with little indication of when they would be available for preorder again. Some workers, desperate for protective gear, found themselves returning to carrotswag.com every day to try again to place an order.

Marsi Rackstraw, an Instacart shopper from Southern California, repeated this process unsuccessfully for over a week until her preorder finally appeared to go through on Thursday. She’s still waiting for a separate order, for a 6-ounce bottle of hand sanitizer, which Instacart had already agreed to provide its workforce for free on March 29.

“I really want to believe they are looking out for us, but I can’t help but feel like the safety kits—if they do exist—are a PR thing or for optics,” Rackstraw says.

A spokesperson for Instacart says that the kits do exist, and that the company began shipping thousands of them out this week. The spokesperson also says that Instacart was prepared to send supplies to all 350,000 workers.

But the company wasn’t prepared to process orders from the entire workforce at once. Instacart confirmed to WIRED that it had capped the number of orders that can be placed each day at an unspecified number of thousands. Once that day’s “inventory” is gone, the kits get listed as out of stock until the company opens up more. There’s no waiting list workers can get on—they have to keep checking carrotswag.com to see if preorders are open again. The spokesperson says Instacart needed to slow the pace of orders coming in so that each one could be validated as coming from a real Instacart shopper, and so that duplicate orders could be deleted. The spokesperson said the company has an entire team dedicated to this process, but did not specify how many people are working on this issue.

None of this was clear to the Instacart workers who spoke to WIRED. Instead they described their confusion and frustration over how to request the kits when they were almost always “out of stock.” Absent official communication, workers say they relied on word of mouth and social media to know when they could try again to place an order. “The company never sent out any kind of alert that they were available,” says one Instacart worker in Los Angeles. “I only knew to grab one because someone posted in the [Instacart Shopper subreddit] that the kits were up.” He says he placed the order last Wednesday morning, “at 10:49 am Los Angeles time,” and the kits were again “out of stock by 11:01.” As of this Thursday, he still had not received any of the items.

Other workers described the website crashing as they tried to place their orders, sending them to various error pages and forcing them to refresh and start all over again. Tony G., an Instacart shopper in Southern California, tried getting his kit a few days ago, but he says the process was so confusing that he still isn’t sure if it worked. “It kept saying ‘error,’ then it said ‘processing.’ There was no indication that it went through.” If Instacart does intend to send him a safety kit, he says he’d at least like to know. “People need reassurance, like, ‘It’s on the way.’”

As noted by Instacart’s spokesperson, the order page now says that the kits will begin shipping the week of April 13, but shoppers who spoke to WIRED say they didn’t know when to expect their kit to arrive—and still don’t. Some have given up on getting their kit altogether.

“Instacart is announcing all over the place that they’re providing it, but there’s no way to receive it,” says Helen W., an Instacart shopper in Santa Barbara. “I’ve tried every single day to get their protective equipment package, and it’s always out of stock. I had to buy a mask from Facebook marketplace because you can’t go into grocery stores in Santa Barbara without one.”

Some workers have started to receive the individual bottles of hand sanitizer Instacart had already agreed to provide before it announced the bigger safety kits. One shopper described the contents of the bottle as “moonshine ethyl alcohol.” Instacart’s spokesperson says the company worked with a third-party manufacturer to create the hand sanitizer, using a formula which includes 65 percent ethyl alcohol, water, and glycerin. Another shopper told WIRED that the product feels like “spraying rubbing alcohol on your hands,” but it did the trick. He just hopes Instacart will send more, since the 6-ounce bottle doesn’t seem like it’ll last long. For now, Instacart has put a cap on one order of hand sanitizer per worker, similar to the safety kits.

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The frustration with safety kits joins a long list of grievances from Instacart workers. Most of Instacart’s 350,000 shoppers are “full-service shoppers,” meaning they buy and deliver groceries to customers’ homes for a small commission. Some have complained that the commission is too small, and they rely on generous tips from customers in order to make ends meet. During the pandemic, shoppers say that the company has sent them on “batch orders”—where they fill grocery carts for multiple people in one go—for the same rate as a single order, resulting in pay that isn’t reflective of the time and effort of those orders. Reports of “tip baiting,” when a customer incentivizes a trip with a large tip and then retroactively reduces it to zero, have become common. When workers went on strike last month, they asked to increase the default tip percentage on orders, add hazard pay during the pandemic, extend the sick leave policy to include people without an official Covid-19 diagnosis, and provide basic supplies, like hand sanitizer. Instacart did not agree to meet any of those demands except for the hand sanitizer.

A smaller portion of Instacart’s workforce are known as “in-store shoppers,” who work set hours inside grocery stores that have a contract with Instacart; these shoppers are classified as employees and paid on an hourly basis. They, too, face the same health risks that come with working in their stores. But at least Instacart has already provided at least some of these workers with masks and other supplies.

An in-store shopper in New York, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, says Instacart started providing masks for the employees in his grocery store on Thursday, one day before Governor Andrew Cuomo would start requiring New Yorkers to wear them in public places. Instacart had already provided the workers in his store with basic supplies, like disinfecting wipes for the grocery carts. “They sent us this email about how we were going to get these masks that were made by a third-party distributor and how they weren’t going to affect the supply for health care workers. We thought, ‘That’s cool,’” he says. “We got them in today, and it looks like someone over at corporate was just sitting at their table cutting them out. It’s very, very thin black cloth. They put a coffee filter behind the cloth to put over your face.”

Supplies like face masks have been in notoriously short supply around the world, leading to things like price gouging and homemade substitutes. US government health officials have also changed their guidance on who should be wearing masks in recent weeks, adding to confusion. The spokesperson for Instacart noted that the company is simply trying to keep up.

Meanwhile, Instacart’s business has surged while much of the US remains shut down as a result of the coronavirus. The Instacart app saw a 218 percent surge, compared to average daily downloads, on March 15 as more states began limiting public gatherings. To meet the growing demand, Instacart announced that it planned to hire 300,000 more full-service shoppers over the next three months. The Instacart spokesperson says the company will provide safety gear to every Instacart shopper who requests it.

Advocacy groups like the Gig Workers Collective say that wouldn’t be enough. “Even if Instacart manages to get its act together in regards to this promise of PPE, their response is still not enough to properly care for workers,” the collective wrote in a blog post just after Instacart’s announcement of the safety kits. “Some Instacart Shoppers, even under the best of conditions and with PPE, will still contract COVID-19. There is still no meaningful progress in protections for the Shoppers who will fall ill.” The group called the move a “pathetic attempt to buy good PR.”


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