I’ve never used instacart and I’ve stopped using grubhub or seamless or whatever, but can someone explain to me why these overpriced delivery services have been deemed the ultimate evil of modern capitalism, it just feels so random
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I used to have to carry my groceries two miles home in the Texas heat
I have a car now but
Had I had the extra 15-20$ it would have been super worth it to insta cart that shit
Ordering groceries is fine, but 1) for most people it’s a convenience and 2) it’s not really reasonable to expect a shopper to put the same effort you would. The loudest users tend to treat it as a necessity and/or complain the shopper isn’t digging through 20 pears to find the best one
I feel like Any time something comes up that disabled people can use to lighten the load that menial tasks bear on their lives, people always turn the conversation to decadence and laziness. It doesn’t exist without its flaws and capitalism is a disease but god forbid people have convenience
For me personally, the one thing I do kinda like about capitalism is the local store, going out to shop experience. It's one of the few social things humans have to do. So while I understand how stuff like this makes it easier for people, it's just sad. We are becoming more secluded every day.
I will say tho, what grinds my gears even more is going to a fast food place and having to click on a machine to get my order. Some fast food places won't even let you talk to the people working there anymore. That shit depresses me to no end.
Socialism is a wide term covering a lot of different ideologies and "utopias". There's plenty of forms of socialism that retain consumerism and private markets.
I think the issue is that people add to the demand of delivery services, increasing workers that are basically wage slaves
That piled with entitlement from folks demanding more from these workers
It's giving "my servant doesn't wash my dishes well enough"
Then wash your own goddamn dishes
I think the liberals do it because it allows them to pin their grievances on this small relatively new thing, rather than understanding that capitalism as a whole is just ripe for exploitation and encouraging instant gratification
We exist in a hierarchy and having food delivered is the most common way of making us aware of that.
Most people can't afford contractors for homes they don't own. They can't pay someone to clean their house. They do, however, have a few bucks to spare to have a burrito driven to them.
Class is mostly hidden or glossed over. We see it on reality TV or at a freeway exit when people ask for money, but that doesn't seem to affect people the same way.
Maybe the act paying someone for a service that's considered a luxury makes people feel more complicit?
I think it's similar to yelling at people for occasionally eating out instead of eating rice and beans for every meal when they correctly point out that groceries are getting really expensive
I think some of it is vibes based tbh. There's just something that feels decadent about the idea of someone sitting at home and paying to get all their stuff delivered to their doorstep.
The theory behind Instacart is great. Like, yes, I very much do want to select my groceries from an easily-readable, searchable web interface instead of spending 1.5 hours in the Capitalism Labyrinth please. This shit is why we invented the fuckin' internet, to make things easier!
It just sucks that the result is an exploitative gig-worker situation and jacked up prices. It's ok to want increased technology to provide increased convenience!
Gig economy connection mostly I reckon. Extremely exploited, often migrant workers rushing about to give what tends to be the middle class and upwards their fast food, braving the weather and shite pay with zero job security.
Liberal analysis means the onus ends up entirely on the consumer to give thumbs up or down regarding the matter, by "voting with their wallets". Good person? You buy your child slave labor chocolate in the store. Bad person? You get it delivered.
That’s why I never understand the idea that criticizing people complaining about instacart is ableist like if I cannot afford instacart as a medium income earner employed full-time surely the person who is unable to work due to disability can’t afford it like shit is expensive. Really expensive.
My annoyance is that it's a genuinely useful option, but people who would benefit most are often priced out. Complain about the cost, not the people using the service.
I wonder what would change if stores ran it instead of a third party leeching off of them. Maybe it only can exist because of IC.
This wasn’t clearly explained to customers, and as someone who airs the complaint calls, people are getting a much worse experience esp. the less tech savvy ones. The people in our department are really good at finding specific strange items, and instacart shoppers won’t even try (2/?)
The level this process is obfuscated to customers is nuts. You can go to instacart and buy groceries, and that has nothing to do with my department. You can go to our stores website and get a delivery, and you’re also getting instacart but it costs more (3/?)
The reason it costs more is that, even though the instacart shopper shops it, one of the employees in my department has to go up and make sure there’s no theft, but also checks quality and for missing items. The latter hardly happens because we are always in a rush to get back to our job (4/?)
I like a lot of the instacart shoppers we have come through, but it’s frustrating to hear how the customers comparatively get treated when I know we can provide better service but we can’t because our company decided to cut costs. These customers are often elderly and disabled and need help (5/?)
Recently an instacart shopper removed all of a customers flowers they had ordered without asking the customer or an employee to help. Obviously I have a chip on my shoulder about it because the customer decided to yell at me, the only person she can link to it, but it still sucks! (6/?)
I do not think it's the "ultimate evil of modern capitalism," but I think it somehow has convinced even more people to treat service workers like servants because of the app interface's dehumanization of the labor. Or at least be much much more vocal about it online.
I actually don't think there's anything wrong with paying someone to do labor you don't want to do. I don't see any virtue in performing poverty. At the same time, these services are still a privilege and they seem to inflate people's egos and entitlement.
Also several cycles of "it's not a luxury service and we should pay them less!" discourse has negatively polarized people against it. It's just a Nice Treat and not an essential unless you physically cannot get out of the house.
This is all odd to me because plenty of stores have pick-up and delivery options that are easier and probably better quality service than Instacart. Instead of moving to a different service (like a customer), this type of person whines and threatens. Very master-servant brained.
In the minds of certain people, when they hear "I get my groceries delivered", they see the spaceship from Wall-E full of obese humans that can't even walk anymore.
They think hiring someone to do a task that others do themselves mean you are lazy and poisoned by the decadence of capitalism
I think it's up there with stuff like people saying if you hire someone to clean for you, you're a horrible person or whatever.
Some person's personal pet peeve can't just be that, it has to be a systemic issue. And a lot of people just like to cook and want everyone to live like them.
As someone who’s suffered from extreme bouts of fatigue ever since I contacted long COVID that have almost crippled my ability to go outside, I rely heavily on my local delivery app for my groceries so I love being shamed for this over and over. Ableism in progressive clothes strikes again.
lmao they got the right answer but didn’t show their work. the only thing i can think of is that this is some form of neo-rugged individualism. you’re only a “real worker” if you have a boss who has a boss exploiting you directly
To be clear, I understand that the gig economy structure isn’t so great. But people seem to always insinuate that “wanting groceries delivered” is the most deranged and evil act of the western consumer. I’d say: it is not lol
I don't think I've ever seen people call it evil, just extremely privileged and over utilized by those who shouldn't be using it and are just putting themselves in debt.
It's understandable for those who have conditions that make it hard to shop for themselves, but nobody goes after those people.
Over reliance on them can bring on state of arrested development, an almost child-like state of food on demand without any acknowledgement of the labor that food and delivery require
Really, so when you walk to the store, the experience of walking to the store makes you think "I sure hope the people who picked the vegetables and packed the meat were paid fairly and not forced to risk their lives by being forced to work during a pandemic."
I promise you that the vast majority of people already have no concept of the labor that food requires even if they are shopping for their own groceries.
I'm snarky about this because my dad ran a general store in Appalachia farm and coal country, and some of THOSE people were so disconnected from it that they couldn't make sense of "Well, so-and-so's storage barn got struck by lightning and burned down, total loss. Now I have to get potatoes...
I don't think you're being snarky at all! Your point is well taken. I don't think most people think about supply chains on their daily shopping. I was mainly referring to GrubHub and an "over reliance" on these tools
...and cucumbers etc. from a warehouse rather than locally, so they cost more and are less fresh."
People who volunteered for the fire company and slogged hoses through a ruin of scorched produce STILL asked why there weren't any local potatoes on sale the next week.
Where did I say that? I said an "over reliance" on this makes you disconnected, and the same would be true if you ordered pizza for every lunch and dinner for a month in 1985
I'd argue owning and using a car is going to have a much more negative environmental impact than getting things delivered and using public transit. Especially if piublic transit was properly invested in and delivery workers were given a struture to unionise under I think things could be a lot better
While yes, the environmental impact of a centralized body delivering en masse is better, I think we should just push for walkable cities instead of hyper consumerism.
I think this is not a structure that is a unique necessity for consumerism and there's plenty of ways less consumerist societies could benefit from delivery services and obviously public transit. Saying "something could be better" is not claiming to have the full solution.
There's also plenty of problems that just having walkable cities won't fix and I'd even say walkable cities are not as incompatible with hyperconsumerism as you seem to imply. Large scale infrastructure and optimising ways to meet the needs of individuals is an important topic in any society.
I'm not saying they would fix or stop hyper consumerism, just rather push for walkable cities instead of accepting or encouraging the hyper consumerism. Especially since it'll likely happen on its own sadly.
I also do find it odd because compared to grubhub, instacart is a downright reasonable purchase. And the former is way more normalized in my experience
Yes ok upon reviewing comments I feel: it’s because it’s a new service and people don’t like people engaging in new forms of gluttony and decadence. Makes sense I guess though I am a bit unsatisfied
I think it's that cultural protestant work ethic. People think it's lazy to order food delivery, but I think they're wrong. It's fine to order food delivery if you're not in a place to go get it yourself. Just make sure to tip generously.
Post Covid lockdown I think many of us have some amount of self horror realizing how quickly we could adapt to a shut-in life. For me delivery grocery is a siren calling out to the laziest parts of me to never leave my apartment box again.
Anyone saying it’s about “gluttony” is lying to you. The issue is whiny babies who complain about their ESL gig slave who just wants to send money to their family back in Dhaka or San Salvador
I think it's not one big reason but rather an intersection of little ones. It's what you said, it's the gig economy and all its sins, the poor reputation of these companies, the fact they're all startups by VC ghouls, the conspicuous consumption, it's customer service culture, etc.
It's also a dynamic process (seeing people deride something makes others evaluate whether they also hate it, for some the answer'll be yes), so random chance can snowball into a pile-on.
Food delivery almost certainly would not be as big or common in a more equitable economy, but service is one of a few things normies actually like about our economic system. Terrible target for us.
A service economy is better than one that does base level manufacturing and is generally better for the people doing it as well.
But it depends how we as consumers interface with that economic system as well.
It definitely depends, and for people employed in food delivery to earn better wages, proper pensions, etc, the service would need to get more expensive. And by extension, there would be fewer people ordering. I'm not sure it's true that it's worse to work in primary and secondary industries.
I think it’s also because it’s people paying a luxury surcharge on food while we hear so many complaints about the price of food. I think the shopping & delivery apps do drive up food costs but also I think it’s easy to conflate things you hear on the internet as kind of coming from one guy.
I was real sad when my preferred grocery store stopped doing it and switched to a third party. I was buddies with my delivery guy, he was funny and he called me amigo.
I agree that it’s the most servant-like task that the current gig nightmare has.
PLUS people are very picky about groceries. Which whatever, but if someone else is doing it and they get the wrong bananas, and you say they shouldn’t have a job. You’re a bad person.
For me, it's the gig economy first and only. My dad used to deliver groceries all the time when he owned his general store, and he'd mostly do it for free at that. But he was also paying himself something that amounted to ~$25/hr when all was said and done.
And, more importantly, delivery food/groceries when the local place does the delivering and order-taking doesn't involve a mostly-obfuscated 10%+ upcharge on every item that disappeared into a venture-cap-run silicon valley monstrosity, in the way that insta and grubhub etc often do.
I think a problem more connected to this is that smaller shops that have every day supplies have been pushed out of business, making it more time consuming and needing longer travel distances to get groceries. So delivery fills a need that could be best fulfilled with other measures.
Smaller shops previously served as meeting points and helped to have a closer community. Get to know surrounding neighbors, including older an disabled people who got connections there. Just like small bars, small bakeries and butchers.
I think people talk about groceries especially because it's the most common example of a more broadly harmful behaviour
'it's not wrong in every instance, but that we collectively lean so hard on exploitative industries for hyper-convenience comes at a cost we're not considering' is way in the weeds
I feel most people's criticisms of it are more about the types of people using it. People who are generally poor or in more difficult economic circumstances who should not be using these extremely privileged services as it only hurts them in the long run.
I think it’s that, for as generic as they are, chores are very personal. I’m outsourcing the inconveniences of my home life to people living in poverty, and that feels exploitative when I can put a face on it. Granted that’s also true of 2-day shipping or discounts at Walmart, but not as visible.
Like I don’t know what it’s like to make a pair of shoes that mysteriously end up costing 30 dollars, but the chores these drivers are doing are extremely vivid and familiar to me, so it’s harder to be seamlessly alienated from the labor of others in this case.
This was a whole Twitter discourse last year. I don't think you'll find any of it particularly stimulating. It's people getting defensive about using a convenience service.
As a former Uber/Instacart driver, you definitely can rate your driver/shopper and they will indeed be moved to the bottom of the list. That’s exactly how it works.
It's okay if want to feel like a Fancy Little Lord and get your treats delivered. In fact you should expect to be treated like a Fancy Little Lord. We can all be Fancy Little Lords.
im disabled, without a car, and i rely on delivery groceries. i used to use instacart, but my regular shopper told me to switch to dumpling and i've used that for years now. same shopper and she gets to set her rates better with it
Because people have been convinced by huge businesses that their minor infractions are driving climate change, and not the mass industrial processes that actually make the big impacts.
Making people care about their "carbon footprint" meant we all started pointing the finger at each other.
I've just realised something. Do American supermarkets not have their own home delivery services? It's been a thing here for years, and definitely in France, Australia, NZ, etc. You do your messages online, book a slot, pay an extra £2 or £3 or so, and the supermarket delivers them to you in crates
As a disabled person who has struggled with the physical act of grocery shopping, instacart has been my main method of getting my groceries. Don't really understand the hatred for it
I think „buy your own groceries“ is a reasonable response to someone complaining about not getting flawless service at a cheap price. Underpaid workers taking on way more work than they could reasonably accomplish to make ends-meets will lead to mistakes. Deal with it or buy your own groceries.
These services feel like a solution made for the urban sprawl that capitalism promised its followers half a century ago. Them being not great just exacerbates the inconvenience of our suburb designs.
Just tried to do a price comparison between using a grocery store's delivery service versus using instacart and apparently I can't even do that without signing up for an account? That's some bullshit.
I can see the appeal that you can pick and chose where your groceries are coming from, so in theory you could always go for the cheapest items? Hard to say if it actually saves you more money without being able to see what the totals come out to.
As a grocery store in-store shopping employee: my job is hard enough already and Instacart specifically makes it so, so much harder because they've partnered with my company to essentially do part of my job and then make me finish it, with extra steps. It's shit, and I hate it.
There are a lot of people that need pick-up and delivery services, but there are also a lot of incredibly entitled people who use them daily and scream at gig shoppers/store employees over the smallest things. I get yelled at more now than I ever did as a cashier.
As someone who exclusively gets groceries from the in-store pickup option thank you for your service you have genuinely one of the most important jobs out there and I’m sure it’s very thankless but grocery shopping is sensory hell and you make it so much better. Can y’all take tips????
We're technically not supposed to and would never expect it from anyone, but if the store cameras can't see the driver's side because of how the cars are parked, go ahead and tip people if you want 💙
I'm glad to be helpful, and I love people who understand when it gets stressful on my end 💙
See that’s so ridiculous imo bc like if I’m getting a luxury like having my groceries brought and loaded into my car for me, let me tip! It’s ridiculous that to use a service I have to choose between feeling guilty for having people out in the cold or feeling worried I’ll get them in trouble like
When I worked at a grocery store we had to politely refuse but then we could take them, you can allow people to politely accept tips without making it feel like an expectation or like customers are being hounded
For my store, it's supposedly something the union agreed to in wage negotiation. The idea is the cashiers and stock guys don't get tips, so the baggers, cafe, and pick-up people shouldn't either. We're just gracious and discreet about it, though there's not much management could do either way.
Part of the problem is that gig delivery drivers pay for their own gas and car maintenance, insurance, etc. In theory, you can just subtract those expenses from income. In practice, people who ignore longer-term expenses see driving as higher income than it is and are more likely to pick it.
It just seems really wasteful and unnecessary to me. Like I understand every now and then but a lot of people's primary way of getting food is through delivery then they complain about how expensive everything is
Think it's just because many people interact with them so frequently, or we know someone who works for them, or we've worked for them ourselves, and they really blew up during the pandemic. Social media companies also aren't the most important corporations in America, but they're Right There.
Being that we have always been used to getting our own groceries for our entire life's as a normal thing that's not a great effort to do, stuff like Instacart just feels excessively luxuriant and the people who use it seem to develop the hyper specific preferences of a crazed rich person.
Using Instacart has the same energy as like Britney Spears asking for MnMs in her makeup room, but only the red ones. Like a whole bowl, make someone sort multiple packs of MnMs so there can be a bowl of just red MnMs. This is probably me doing "old man yells at cloud" tho
Unfortunately, it is. Concert riders ask for odd dressing room requests bc they are the canary in the coal mine. If the M&Ms are wrong, the stage electrical wiring probably is too.
I was indifferent until I started seeing that Instacart was sending me emails trying to poach people to use their foodstamps with their service. You can see I actually emailed my senator about this, but this is perfectly legal. Despite being legal, it feels pretty evil.
To elaborate, the reason I consider this evil is that it's a private company soliciting people to use foodstamps for a service that actively reduces the amount of food a dollar can actually buy.
Many grocery stores have delivery services for people in need that are cheaper or even free!
i think some ppl mistake criticizing the ppl who use an exploitative service as the same as criticizing the systems/companies doing the exploitation. i think mostly it's a moral reflex (in this case, instacart users are "lazy") that then gets dressed up in progressive language to justify itself.
people who seem to actually have a cogent argument against these types of services (that i largely agree with as material analyses) are in the minority. however, there is the reality that a lot of disabled people rely on these services bc the government won't help them, and that's also a problem.
Ableism mostly from what I can tell. "Can't you just go to the grocery store yourself" unfortunately, plenty of people actually can't for various reasons. Lot of "you're too lazy" rhetoric boils to ableism unfortunately
imo if someone is acting like this its a pretty strong sign that they probably could go to the store if they wanted to but just decided to be entitled instead.
Well of COURSE if you're disabled it's fine but if you're able bodied it's not. I can see no way this sentiment could possibly backfire on any disabled person
How are you going to judge if someone is disabled enough to be allowed to ethically order grocery delivery anyway 😭 can I get my groceries delivered bc I have adhd or chronic pain or does that not count bc I can still physically walk to the grocery store and carry my groceries home
I do my own grocery shopping anyways bc it's not a particularly difficult task for me and I'm a bit neurotic about doing it The Right Way but I can easily see why someone else with my same disabilities/health conditions would find it a lot easier to pay someone else to do it
Update: I've since learned OP in the screenshot is responding to a specific case in a shitty way. The "you should buy your own groceries" is based on that specific knowledge. I still broadly think disabled people who use services like this shouldn't be demonized for doing so.
I also don't think venting about poor service online is evil. But OP was being specifically shitty and deserved to be cut down. I was being too deferential to her.
The Ablesim argument gets brought up a ton in these sort of debates and it is mostly annoying. Obviously there is a reasonable middlepoint here, but more often than not „ableism“ gets used as a justification for bad complaints about the gig economy.
I would argue this is not the primary factor. Most critiques I’ve seen of grocery delivery have a “obviously doesn’t apply for the disabled” caveat. In general discourse, sure maybe.
Most instacart users are not disabled, and definitely not the ones who keep complaining about the race of the delivery person. Don't confuse wanting cheap servants for ableism
The person in the tiktok (because that account wasn't the one actually complaining and posted a video of someone else), was complaining about wanting to choose a woman shopper. Going on her profile, she's a beauty influencer and clearly not disabled. Stop excusing this behaviour
You were very confident about the complaints being ableism and not the actual reason. Not my fault lol also part of the blame goes to Joel for not posting the full screenshot (I wonder why 🤔)
And again, not a specific case, but the broad majority.
Nobody is ever saying that if you are so disabled you can’t go buy your own groceries that you shouldn’t be using instacart people are saying if you use instacart bc you cannot be bothered to buy your own groceries then you should not complain about your results bc you could’ve bought them yourself
In, Sweden, a lot of the big grocery store chains have implemented home delivery that's delivered by employees with actual wages and benefits, which is awesome. Giving money to Uber Eats and "Foodora" who argue that their employees aren't actually employees, is what's wrong and should be discouraged
On the whole, including services like GrubHub I think its more when people act like its a right more so than a luxury. I think of that Jules Suzdaltsev where he was BLOWN AWAY it cost a lot to get a burrito hand delivered in NYC.
With Instacart specifically, I see a lot less discourse about the price and more about the language barrier that's usually between shopper and carter(?), which can lead to some real nasty complaints that are less about the service and more about the carter not speaking English as a first language.
My guess is that it feels more decadent than ordering takeout because grocery shopping is something normal you usually do frequently. Ordering takeout is more of a treat.
(Obv. for folks with mobility issues ordering groceries is a different story.)
i guess ideally in this scenario (being charitable about the sentiment), each grocery store would have figured out their own delivery service and it would have been well-known, affordable, etc. in reality though, people will always complain about something that isn't the way it used to be.
i think with posts like this it's just that people who seem to use these apps often enough to post these kinds of petty complaints about their shoppers come off as entitled and annoying and then discourse tends to spiral out from there
This seems like the core of it, rather than a luddite reaction to new services.
The loudest and most visible users of these services are miserable assholes, tainting an otherwise innocuous service that many folks legitimately depend on.
And in the age of No-Nuance people come down on one side or another without wiggle room. Either it's always acceptable to order delivery food or it's never acceptable, which is absurd.
this speaks less to some sort of moral value of using these services and more of a reality with automating food service jobs, but i think this specific annoyance identified in jelly’s tweet can be applied to any food service job with limited staff and lots of customization options
as someone who worked in a cafe/bakeshop which prioritized having a bunch of drink syrups/sandwich breads/toppings, there were a LOT of situations where we would run out of something midway through the day and would have to talk w/ the customer in order to find a substitution
when you’re in-person it’s easy to humanize what led to those mistakes, i.e. “wow these employees are running around dealing with a bunch of customers and have minimal time to prepare ingredients in between” so very few people get frustrated at me
but that is basically impossible to do online, which leads to some really short tempers when online orders don’t come out exactly how people want them to. employees from a sister location that does online orders have horror stories
grocery stores are similar in this way; people make the same choices and substitutions on the fly when grocery shopping! but it’s incredibly easy to forget that when ordering things online, since you *feel* that the factory precision of an online interface is reflected in how groceries are picked
I'd wager it has something to do with the performative aspect of existing under capitalism. Doing your chores, being a functionable adult is an integral part of identity. If you can't manage balancing being crushed by the machinations of capitalism with doing your own chores, you _are_ a failure.
It to me seems a lot like the typical attitude of "I had to suffer, so you must to.". There is just a lot of lack of empathy here and it evokes some really ableist undertones as well.
I think the intent is less anti-instacart and more, “this person is being picky about gig workers, they want something done to their specifications they should do it themselves.” I, for one, believe that gig works have a right to do as shitty of a job as they please, given how little they’re paid.
The evil is treating gig workers who are paid basically nothing poorly. Suggesting ways to punish them more harshly for "poor performance" comes off managerial and gross.
Its definitely not the ultimate evil of capitalism. It is however a luxury service that's very wasteful and easily avoidable for most people. And a lot of annoying people like to pretend it's not.
Well, with inflation and housing costs continuing to rise and more and more people pushed into low-income jobs and and homelessness, I'd say human misery is going to become a lot more visible all over the formerly industrialized and so-called developed world.
People got the taste of having a direct personal servant for the first time and at a cheap cost that was subsidized by venture capitol and low interest rates. Now prices have gone up and they've become very condescending and entitled about the servants and their service
There's been instances in history where left wing governments made cheap servants unaffordable to the middle class which radicalized the middle class into a fascist backlash. People argue this is why Bolsonaro got elected after Lula
grubhub in particular basically ran as a protection racket for a long time, as did many of these other services.
they don't create or produce anything and weren't invited into the industries they're in by the people who create and produce things. they then threw elbows and attacked restaurant >
i worked at grubhub briefly when another company i worked at was bought by them. they'd buy domain names of new restaurants and set up fake websites that would route calls for orders through grubhub's call center, then bill the restaurants for "order origination" even though the customer had seeked>
similarly, postmates caused lots of damage to restaurants by just offering delivery at places that explicitly didn't offer it, then doing a shitty job of it.
these companies DO nothing. they are adversaries to ALL sides of the marketplace they stand up.
their drivers are exploited as contractors. the restaurants, who were largely skeptical of them, now have no choice but to use them despite their misgivings. the platforms actively avoid sharing data about the people who order with the restaurants trying to build a customer base, hurting them.
despite not even attempting to make food, these companies have turned themselves into the brands that represent "local food" and largely severed the relationship between most people and their local restaurants.
it's a specific kind of capitalism that's fucking annoying as all shit.
I think I'll zoom out to the gig economy in general here - the conditions do not exist for us to be able to briefly hire each other, as individuals, and have it not turn adversarial.
There is a world in which it is possible for someone to sell a little of their time to shop for another normal person. We don't live in it. It inevitably devolves into this thing we keep seeing over and other. It's another thing that has us at each other's throats.
My wife and I use Walmart+ Home Delivery, which does get us the convenience upside, but also the people executing those deliveries are hourly workers driving a company vehicle from a nearby store who know the layout of that store well. It works pretty well when it's someone's actual job. FWIW
ya same here in australia. if i get groceries delivered, its by a professional delivery driver, and many different places have this option. the big companies offer uber as a quick option but its vastly more expensive, and i don't bother with it. Delivery has always existed.
Sorry to get a little off topic, but do american stores not have their own delivery services? I'm confused why you would need a 3rd party app for online grocery shopping. Every major supermarket here has delivery options
If they did, I don't think it was obvious. My mother must have been getting groceries delivered in her last year of life, but the idea surprised me and I'm not sure how she arranged it; calling the supermarket? Certainly not something I was aware of as a regular option.
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I have a car now but
Had I had the extra 15-20$ it would have been super worth it to insta cart that shit
That piled with entitlement from folks demanding more from these workers
It's giving "my servant doesn't wash my dishes well enough"
Then wash your own goddamn dishes
Most people can't afford contractors for homes they don't own. They can't pay someone to clean their house. They do, however, have a few bucks to spare to have a burrito driven to them.
Maybe the act paying someone for a service that's considered a luxury makes people feel more complicit?
I also can't afford them, because I'm disabled.
I wonder what would change if stores ran it instead of a third party leeching off of them. Maybe it only can exist because of IC.
Now, because employees are expensive, they cut a lot of our staff and now all our deliveries are shopped by instacart (1/?)
which highlight that this is a high tech way to have an underclass.
Grocery delivery run by non-weirdo billionaires would probably work fine.
They think hiring someone to do a task that others do themselves mean you are lazy and poisoned by the decadence of capitalism
Some person's personal pet peeve can't just be that, it has to be a systemic issue. And a lot of people just like to cook and want everyone to live like them.
It's understandable for those who have conditions that make it hard to shop for themselves, but nobody goes after those people.
You know, those things people buy to cook their own food?
Fuck. This is Tumblr shit.
People who volunteered for the fire company and slogged hoses through a ruin of scorched produce STILL asked why there weren't any local potatoes on sale the next week.
But it depends how we as consumers interface with that economic system as well.
Like even a $10 delivery is a life saver for a parent of 2.
Ya, upcharging a $10 taco bell run to $40 is stupid, but there is some real value in the services.
I agree that it’s the most servant-like task that the current gig nightmare has.
PLUS people are very picky about groceries. Which whatever, but if someone else is doing it and they get the wrong bananas, and you say they shouldn’t have a job. You’re a bad person.
'it's not wrong in every instance, but that we collectively lean so hard on exploitative industries for hyper-convenience comes at a cost we're not considering' is way in the weeds
Making people care about their "carbon footprint" meant we all started pointing the finger at each other.
I'm glad to be helpful, and I love people who understand when it gets stressful on my end 💙
Many grocery stores have delivery services for people in need that are cheaper or even free!
since i dont really have much of a choice i dont think its right to be shitty to the people giving me my food even if they forget something
But I don’t think this is the main thing.
Do you know if the shoppers the person is complaining about have a disability? Do you think the client even cares?
And again, not a specific case, but the broad majority.
Who would've guessed lifestyle influencers were lazy and privileged?
(Obv. for folks with mobility issues ordering groceries is a different story.)
The loudest and most visible users of these services are miserable assholes, tainting an otherwise innocuous service that many folks legitimately depend on.
Theyve never seen a slaughterhouse, or an agricultural megaplex, or a nasty dangerous warehouse
They do see overworked underpaid servants all day everyday though.
Perspective is king.
I never interact with a single human at a big box store, save the cashier, if they even have those anymore.
Always made me more uncomfortable, for some reason.
A worker stocking shelves might as well be part of the fixtures.
A guy showing up in his own car to your house, to directly hand you a thing just kinda hits different.
It ain’t right, idk if its true, but its how i feel when i think about it.
The end point servants delivering those ill gotten goods never are.
It’s part of the drive to automate the last chain of the link.
At that point, the mass human suffering will be out of mind FOREVER
I dont see that changing, unfortunately.
they don't create or produce anything and weren't invited into the industries they're in by the people who create and produce things. they then threw elbows and attacked restaurant >
restaurants are low-margin businesses. the commissions these services charge to restaurants are exploitative.
similarly, postmates caused lots of damage to restaurants by just offering delivery at places that explicitly didn't offer it, then doing a shitty job of it.
these companies DO nothing. they are adversaries to ALL sides of the marketplace they stand up.
it's a specific kind of capitalism that's fucking annoying as all shit.