Back in the old days, when we actually manufactured clothing in this country, there was this concept of "piece work". You weren't paid by the hour, but instead by your work output. E.g. if you were performing some sewing step on a blouse, such as adding buttons, you might be paid $0.25 per blouse for that work step.

Of course employers tried to cheat, by setting the per-piece rate very low. You had to process many pieces to get a reasonable wage.

The Federal government was forced to step in. They required monitoring of all this activity so that "all employees, including piece work employees, earn at least the minimum wage."[1]

If only the people running the sweatshops in the old days thought to call their people "contractors" instead of "employees". They could have avoided most of the pesky regulation.

I'm being sarcastic. Clearly those people were employees under any reasonable definition. Same should apply here. This whole gig economy crap has gotten totally out of hand.

Fundamentally, an Instacart worker only has flexibility of when to work. The rest is more-or-less predetermined. Should that person be a contractor instead of an employee because he has his choice of the order in which to traverse the supermarket aisles? Should that person be a contractor because he has his choice of which streets to drive on from store to destination?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piece_work#Minimum_wage