This is a certain columnist on Salon.com who cited a study saying that women customers dread male Instacart shoppers. Here’s the scoop.
Salon.com’s Ashlie Stevens, a senior food editor for the publication, recently wrote a commentary titled “Why women dread male Instacart shoppers” wherein she mentioned this particular study showing how women hate, hate, hate male Instacart shoppers.
“Behind the jokes about grocery substitutions is a familiar frustration: paying for help and still doing the work,” she started her piece. Interesting.
She dropped a study, no other than Instacart’s 2025 economic impact report, saying that 61 percent of surveyed shoppers identified as women, and also cited Uber’s environmental, social, and governance report in 2024, finding out how women were made up to 18 percent of its American drivers, but 46 percent of its couriers. So, it’s like comparing oranges with apples, and mistaking “parsley for cilantro,” as Stevens would put it.
It’s interesting because Stevens stated that even the male shoppers are “irriated by the stereotype.
The commentator highlighted a Reddit commenter who explained how he handled his family’s grocery shopping and knew his local stores intimately, saying, “As a male shopper I hate these posts. Bad shoppers are bad shoppers. Being male has nothing to do with it.”
Stevens specifically noticed how male Instacart shoppers treat women customers not right, in her opinon
“Over the past couple of years, however, the substitutions became increasingly adventurous. Shoppers, often from profiles with traditionally male names, would inform me that a supermarket had apparently run out of tomatoes in every conceivable form. Fresh, canned, crushed, diced: all gone. Carrots became parsnips. Green cabbage became spinach. More than once, I found myself studying photographs of grocery shelves, circling the very products I’d requested and sending the images back to my shopper, who would politely assure me that they weren’t available,” that’s how she put it.
And then what’s worse, there were orders in which a request for Panko breadcrumbs was fulfilled with a box of vanilla wafers. Insane.
“These are reasonable objections. A competent man shouldn’t be presumed incompetent because a stranger on the internet received three bags of parsley. And grocery shopping for other people is genuinely difficult. A customer may have exacting preferences, a store may rearrange its shelves and an apparently suitable replacement may turn out to contain an allergen,” Stevens went on.
Instacart, which was previously featured recently here on Ridesharingforum.com, is an online grocery shopping and delivery platform that connects customers with nearby supermarkets and retailers. Customers browse products through the app or website, place orders, and select delivery or pick-up. Personal shoppers collect the requested items, handle substitutions when necessary, and deliver groceries directly to customers’ doorsteps.
What are your thoughts? Don’t be afraid to reveal what’s in your mind, even if this column was obviously written by a woman, so there’s so sort of a bias. Get that account now on RSF to share those thoughts! Christmas is happening, so stay right where you are! This is, RSF! ‘Til then!