This daughter did a fascinating move by shadowing the shopping habits of her mom on Instacart during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the results are crazy!
The conclusion: even being an Instacart shopper isn’t easy, dissimilar to what everybody will think.
“I’ll admit that I didn’t really think all too much about it either, until my mom started Instacart shopping during the height of the pandemic almost six years ago in Charlotte, North Carolina. Back in those days I used to keep her company, but I was only half-paying attention; now that I am a groceries editor, I was way more interested in spending a day shadowing my mom as she worked her Instacart shift,” the kitchn correspondent Ali Domrongchai wrote, thinking of this perspective on what to share with readers today, recalling her mom’s Instacart shopping habits.
Domrongchai describers herself as a Southern-raised, Brooklyn-based food editor who covers groceries in this publication. She grew up in a family who owns a Thai restaurant, sparking her love of food. She has previously did writings and work for Food & Wine, Travel + Leisure, and Allrecipes. She’s a self-confessed sweet tooth.
Her point is that, when Instacart, no doubt, makes grocery shopping a whole lot easier, it’s still not easy when it comes to the technicalities.
“My mom has been doing this for years – long enough to develop a sixth sense for selecting the ripest fruit (she’s an expert avocado-picker), memorize store layouts, and learn the delicate art of empathetically texting complete strangers about their groceries. With nearly 1,000 orders under her belt, I think it’s safe to say that my mom is a pro,” she noted as well.
So, she thought of this one thing: to re-visit the shopping habits of her mom, and see how much she’s making.
The daughter-and-mom tandem started by spending their day at Costco, Publix, and Food Lion, shopping a total of five different orders over the course of about three hours.
In their first order, there were two batches of Costco, with the first order having 28 units, plus a few heavy items – bags of rice and water bottles that needed two carts for this order – and the second being six items from the bakery. Here, the daughter stated her mom made $93.29, taking them two and a half hours to finish.
The second order went like this, Domrongchai wrote, “At Publix, we had a similar deal where we shopped two batch orders. The first order was 52 units, and the second one was just eight items (Instacart often stacks a large order with a smaller one). It took us about an hour and a half, and she made $68.24 on this job.”
The third involved Food Lion for the last order, which mostly comprised of drinks – lots of soda, water bottles, and juice – with 12 units, but it was heavy. Her mom made $34.74 on it.
So, the total was five hours, and $196.27. It’s not about the price tag, actually, but the fact that even from the point-of-view of the shopper, Instacart shopping is a lot of work, she wrote.
“It’s easy to think of grocery delivery as a simple convenience, but behind every order is a shopper juggling far more than just a list. The job is physical. There’s lots of walking aisles, lifting heavy bags, and loading and unloading groceries. In one day, we hit 10,000 steps from a five-hour shopping ordeal. It’s also mentally taxing: tracking substitutions, comparing prices and sizes, and managing multiple orders at once, all while staying on schedule. Don’t take any of it lightly,” the correspondent further pointed out.
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