Instacart ‘shoppers’ to walk off the job in protest of company’s tip policy

Workers who do the shopping and delivery for San Francisco grocery-delivery company Instacart plan to walk off the job for three days starting Sunday in a labor action intended to pressure the firm into restoring a 10 percent default tip. An organizer said thousands of “shoppers” across the U.S. will be taking part in the protest.

Menlo Park shopper Vanessa Bain, an organizer of the walk-off, said she started working for Instacart almost four years ago, when the default tip was 10 percent. She has seen her income from the job plunge from up to $1,500 a week, before expenses, for 40 to 45 hours of work to only a couple hundred dollars a week, after the company changed its tipping and pay formulas so she makes less money per order and can’t take many orders because they won’t pay enough, she said. Shoppers’ base pay — derived from the orders they choose to fulfill — has been cut to the point that they rely heavily on tips, but Instacart last year dropped the default tip to 5 percent at best, and for some customers using certain versions of the app or using grocers’ platforms, zero or a flat $2, Bain said.

“When I was making really decent money doing this, probably up to 50 percent of my income was tips,” said Bain, 33. “When you cut that in half that’s essentially taking away a quarter of our pay.” The vast majority of customers tip shoppers, and use the default tip amount, Bain added.

Dozens of Instacart “shoppers” signed a letter published Friday on Medium to company CEO Apoorva Mehta, laying out a litany of grievances and demanding the firm bring the default tip amount back up to 10 percent. Shoppers have walked off the job for the past three years over pay and tips, the letter said.

“You have a well-documented history of unscrupulous actions against Instacart’s shoppers,” the letter said. “You have demonstrated a pattern of behavior as CEO of eviscerating our pay and pirating our tips.

“Understand this: You are the CEO, but we hold the power. We are highly organized and more agitated than ever.”

Instacart, on Friday afternoon, said in a statement, “We take the feedback of the shopper community very seriously and remain committed to listening to and using that feedback to improve their experience.”

The company added that while the default tip is set to 5 percent of the order total, with a minimum of $2, the customer can raise or lower it to any amount. All tips go to shoppers, Instacart said.

The workers complained in the letter that in 2016, Instacart replaced a default 10 percent tip option for customers with a “sneaky and identical-looking” 10 percent service fee that customers mistook for a tip but instead funneled the money to the company. When Instacart put the tip option back onto the app, it made it hard for customers to find, and “misleadingly” identified it as an “additional tip,” workers alleged.

As a result of a legal settlement from a class-action lawsuit by shoppers, the company addressed the “additional tip” issue in 2017, then made the tip option prominent again last year, before cutting the default tip in half, Bain said.

Also this year, according to the shoppers’ letter, Instacart — which puts its number of shoppers at 130,000 — “quietly rolled out another pay cut” that lowered minimum guaranteed compensation by up to 30 percent in nearly all markets.

In 2017, Instacart, without admitting wrongdoing, agreed to settle the class-action lawsuit by shoppers over alleged improprieties with tips, expense reimbursement, and the service fee said to look like a tip. Last year, Mehta apologized after saying his company had withheld shoppers’ tips by accident, because of a bug, but didn’t quantify the amounts withheld.