DoorDash to acquire Instacart
about.doordash.com
about.doordash.com
Third party delivery services essentially break the chain of responsibility... food late and cold? tough luck, but please tip in advance. If you don't tip your driver will be very mad at you, maybe they'll text you about it, and we pay them so poorly that it's actually your fault for keeping them impoverished. Talk to our customer service bots and maybe we'll give you a $5 coupon for your next Doordash order.
Some people are professional about it (I bring my own drink carriers, food bags, etc and have a minor Andretti gene so orders are as quick as the law allows), but most of the others I see doing it may as well not be. Slow, lazy, check nothing, and look like they just fell out of a methadone clinic (read: not the person you want showing up at your door in the dark at 8pm).
It's frustrating if you try to do it properly but get judged by customers like you're some out of work junkie (when, ironically, most people I deliver to live in a lower-income situation than I do).
From the driver's side, you get inundated with low-paying orders, often rapid-fire as you're driving to either pick up or deliver another order (like so bad that if you're not paying attention, you could get into an accident). Like literal Pavlov's dog, bell jingling over the top of the navigation instructions and a big pop up on screen. Essentially [1].
The entire thing is a psychological rat trap (by design as best as I can tell as these apps aren't terribly complicated to build/design; just scale), so it's not a total surprise when your driver fails to provide good service. They actually make it quite difficult to provide good service (e.g., I routinely get "already picked up" orders on my late night runs w/ no compensation for sitting/waiting on restaurant staff).
I think a lot of people should try doing deliveries via these apps a few times just to experience it. The psychological pressure alone likely makes a lot of people crack. It's all quite fucked up.
Food generally arrives warm and if not, a quick heat up in the air fryer generally solves most things. Soup based noodles are generally packed separately that you need to prepare it at home anyway.
My main gripe is there is the general occasional missed small item (like sauces, a drink), which I do complain about in DD. I imagine DD does provide this feedback to restaurants because it has been trending better over time.
Unfortunately the existence of the (less-good) delivery options through DD and IC likely facilitated that decision.
so now you have delivery services paid at a similar wage anyway, but a whole third party organization that needs to extract its rent from the system
> to Help Local Stores Win
Any local store will tell you DD is a necessary evil they put up with but strongly dislike overall. From the % of sales they take to the incredibly rude delivery drivers, DD is not well liked.
On multiple occasions a family member's employees (or they, themselves) have had a DD delivery driver cut to the front of the line, interrupt the cashier, and shove their phone in their face. No words, no anything, just "here is the code/screen/whatever I need to show you to pick up the order". DD doesn't let stores rate delivery drivers so there isn't any recourse.
Quite a few of them spoke no English, so yes, they'd just present their phone screen. I didn't take it as rude. It was a very clear and direct communication. A simple scan, and boom, nothing further needed, I could just scan their items. Thr QR code scan handled payment and everything. They almost always helped with doing thier own bagging: Time is money, after all.
I want to be clear, the ability to speak English is not what I took issue with. That doesn't bother me and I'm fine with just showing the phone screen, no conversation. The issue I had was cutting the line and essentially demanding they be helped immediately. Wait in line like everyone else. This is a small food stall in a food hall with often just 1 person working the front. If they are actively helping another customer and have a line, I find it unacceptable to think you can cut to the front and immediately demand attention. What message does that send to the customers in line? "You're less important than delivery orders", and I can tell you that isn't the case due to the large chunk that DD takes.
My family member has even considered shutting down DD orders temporarily if/when the drivers act this way and publishing on social media about it. According to them, the loss in sales (and overall profit, which is minor on DD orders) wouldn't matter compared to the publicity/engagement (I don't know, that's not my world).
I noticed a more extreme version of this while traveling in mainland China. Takeout shops, especially bubble tea shiops, that were genuinely pleasant a decade ago now seem entirely beholden to delivery algorithms and their productivity targets, with walk-in customers reduced to an afterthought. I once waited a half hour in the rain for a bubble tea while delivery orders repeatedly jumped ahead throwing their QR codes in people's faces; the moment I requested a refund, my order was suddenly next. I don't particularly blame the staff, but they weren't apologetic and I was really bothered that algorithmic metrics were prioritized at the expense of basic social courtesy. Watching those incentives gradually erode everyday social norms was genuinely depressing.
And all the stuff you mention.
The one restaurant owner I know who’s happy with DD set up an entirely separate kitchen in an industrial park. But to get to the DD revenue necessary to justify that investment, he had a couple of years of DD hell in his main restaurant.
Could see the kitchen areas through a window and they weren't necessarily dirty, but looked sketchy for some reason. Few people, robots delivering orders, one set of cooks making the food. Just dystopian.
We might as well just build ready to eat food factories that pipe the slop directly into your house. We got rid of the "inconvenience" of going out to eat and enjoying a restaurant. Why not get rid of the pesky delivery middle-man too?
And the DD-specific kitchen I know is basically just a typical restaurant kitchen minus attached dining. You can make slop in an industrial park, you can make slop in a real restaurant (I’ve certainly experienced that).
Why in the world would it be necessary to have dining tables for a kitchen to make good food?
What I don't understand is why DD gets any cut of the store's profit. They should be paying retail like anyone else, and their customer paying for the delivery costs.
It's a finder's fee, a very old and ordinary concept in business. The more sales you can bring to a company (or could divert to competitors), the more skin in the game you have. That's not to say I think these companies aren't in some ways anticompetitive to the detriment of merchants and DIY shoppers.
In theory it's because that customer wouldn't be purchasing without DD. In practice it's a shakedown.
Making the driver wait in line and refusing to accept that behavior seems like a reasonable recourse.
Fuck DoorDash and their drivers. The whole model is flawed and don't even get me started on the absurd tipping entitlement off late. WTF is even 30% of your food bill so normalized as a tip? The same model in Singapore is really so much streamlined in comparison - You order from Grab and it's so much nicer than this garbage, everyone gets paid fairly and restaurants will tell grab drivers to fuck off if they cut the line.
It's true that the legislation provides some protections, but that's based on "active time" which doesn't include the time returning to "hotspots" where you may be assigned orders.
As an example, if someone in a residential area that's 10 minutes from the nearest restaurant orders a delivery, you are "active" while picking up the delivery and driving to the customer, but not for the 10 minutes driving back out of the residential area. It's a bit of a waiting game.
Also, I can tell you from personal experience that most customers are not tipping. My average tip per order (across 1300 orders) is between 50 cents and 70 cents per order. If you are tipping on all your orders it's definitely appreciated though.
> Fuck DoorDash and their drivers.
I agree with fuck Doordash, but not sure why you have so much animosity towards people working this job.
That's exactly what it's like in NYC. They just walk up with their huge backpacks straight to the front skipping everyone, turn around bumping people, show their phone, then stand RIGHT in the front as-if no one else exists. It's awful.
I'd love to contribute to a no-delivery store. Pickup or dine-in only.
Edit: Might have to re-think Pickup because that would just become a loophole for delivery. Maybe orders have to be placed in-store for to go.
I don't understand why you think they should wait in line in restaurants where people order at the counter, to pick up their order which was placed online. And if you want to see this, you should be supporting legislation makes them proper employees who get a proper wage based on their time working.
Also, why would those who pay to be there have to wait in line, but people who get paid by a third-party service to be there don’t? That doesn’t make sense.
I don’t get why we’re talking legislation; it’s basic courtesy.
If I said “hey, here’s $5 if you go cut the line at that restaurant,” does that make it right?
Lots of people cycling all in black on ebikes on pavements making it dangerous for people to walk around safely and causing chaos for drivers and other cyclists. Also generally supporting big business over small stores. Everyone moans about having individuals charged with these minor traffic offences but in my view just targeting companies like JustEat directly and having massive fines based on employee behaviour would be far more effective.
Freak what you feel but delivery apps are just not worth it for me personally outside of those necessary contexts and I don't mind the inconvenience of picking up my own food.
I stopped using them when they switched to instacart -- the instacart shoppers really don't care about service, they're just trying to deliver orders as fast as possible so they can more to the next one. They'll pack ice cream with a warm rotisserie chicken so you end up with molten ice cream as it sits in their trunk for 45 minutes while they make 2 deliveries before yours. And in the half dozen or so times I used them, not a single order was correct.
Now I use Amazon Whole Foods because even though they use gig drivers for the delivery, the food is well packed (and they use foil lined bags for cold products that do a decent job of keeping cold foods cold.
It used to be there was a significant premium for this service and that's why I wouldn't do it but not anymore. In places like NYC - it's actually much cheaper than local options.
Out of the group of people who have food delivered, that food mostly comes from restaurants or grocery stores. Instacart/DD will be a behemoth of food delivery.
Whenever I bring this up, someone always goes "so disabled people should starve"? What did they do before delivery apps? Many restaurants still offer delivery that they do themselves (seriously, look it up). But more importantly, meals on wheels and other services are still a very large, established network.
Anyways, I guess I could be convinced that this is bad for restaurants. But so many restaurants, especially in cities, are offering delivery services where 10 and 20 years ago there were none. And the infrastructure is not set up to handle that.
As a result, city streets are frequently blocked by delivery drivers. I genuinely would love if my city passed a resolution that prevented restaurants within the city center from offering DoorDash/Ubereats unless they had a dedicated parking lot.
- you have school kids and a full time
- a medical condition
- work 2 jobs because economy is fucked.
- can’t drive of old age.
And a million other reasons. In old times with a working community, delivery was a luxury, in “modern” days, it is often a necessity for lack of alternatives.
When was the last time you offered the old people down the road if they need help?
How is it different than customers driving to the restaurant? Are you suggesting that there should be less restaurants, or people should use public transport to pick up food?
They do serve the same market for gig workers that don’t want to be ride share drivers, though, right? I wonder what their market share is for that.
In my area Walmart is on Instacart and I've often wondered how that squares with their own delivery service.
Merging reduces platform inefficiencies and drivers can work both situation.
I am actually amazed both companies are alive and making a profit.
DD plays big games with pay, sometimes hides tips, drives down base pay, and stacks orders with good pay and bad pay offers to try and pay drivers as little money as possible.
In a bad economy, there's less people ordering on DD (although higher income earners who aren't as effective by economic effects don't change habits), however, it drives MORE desperate drivers to the platform that accept the low pay orders since they no longer have an income. This drives down all wages for drivers, and costs, which in turn pads DD's margins.
We actually see this seasonally in the summer when more students and teachers join the platform over the break. There's a glut of drivers, you can't cherry pick higher paying orders and most stuff that's left to fight for is low paying, no tip orders. When school starts back up things return to normal.
This is why DD is trying to sign up as many drivers as possible. If you remove the scarcity of drivers, then every low paying gig will eventually get picked up, driving average pay down and you can ratchet down your base pay hoping customer tips make up the slack.
You're probably absolutely right about this, and some people in the company, or who invest in it, have likely made this exact (cold hard) calculation.
This was literally why Rockefeller was a big proponent of the monopoly. Unfortunately exploitation is the tradeoff that is enables
None of the money saved by reducing inefficiencies will lower prices for consumers or increase pay for drivers. The goal is always to charge customers the most while giving them the least, while paying employees as little as they can get away with. In theory merging also kills off competition that might steal customers and workers by offering better prices/wages, although in practice companies share the same goal of screwing over both consumers and workers and are perfectly willing to resort to collusion in order to do that most efficiently.
Outside of that, this is ultimately two services where a middleman takes a decent cut while their delivery label is compensated entirely by the customer. Once the model is established and locked-in, this should theoreically be a very easy business to maintain.
From the NYT version of this story:
> DoorDash said the median payment to be returned to workers amounts to around $48. > City officials said about 700 workers are owed more than $10,000 each; more than 27,000 workers are owed more than $1,000; and more than 4,000 workers are owed more than $5,000.
DoorDash also spent (from what I can tell) (1+1.4+1.8) million dollars to campaign against Mamdani.
There is debate about whether or not Doordash needed to do this, if they are just being vindictive etc. But what we do know is that regulation came at a cost to NYC consumers. And it wasn't just Door Dash. Uber Eats added a $2 fee and Instacart added a $5.99 fee. New Yorkers can determine for themselves if they want to pay higher prices to ensure higher wages.
[0] https://about.doordash.com/en-us/news/changes-to-fees-nyc
Don't fall for the spin. This is just an added cost they always wanted to add. If Mamdami wasn't in NYC, they would just call it a "service Fee" or "delivery fee" (which is different from the Driver's Tip) like they do here. Or make up a anew fee altogether.
https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/09/mayor-mamdani...
Culper Research released a report about a year ago indicating a large component of DoorDash labor is very likely undocumented workers (which is not meant to be derogatory towards these workers, but signal that DoorDash needs labor willing to take gig payments on offer to make the model work).
https://img1.wsimg.com/blobby/go/cc91fda7-4669-4d1b-81ce-a0b...
I don't think the platform economics are working post ZIRP ("zero interest rate policy") as wages rise and margins compress, would need more data to understand what forward curves look like.
Back during Covid, Congress passed and Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act ("IRA"), which actually did a couple of good things.
One of those was the Corporate Alternative Minimum Tax ("CAMT"). For non-Americans, AMTs are a weird thing where Congress basically gives up and decides the tax code is too complex so they give up and say whatever your deductions are, if the AMT produces a higher amount, that's what you have to pay. Every complexity is somebody's special interest so repealing them can be hard. It's kind of why the carried interest tax credit has never been repealed.
Repealing it, as Republicans tried to do, is hard to do because the counter-messaging is "well if the corporate tax rate is 21%, why do you care about repealing a minimum of 15%?". Everybody understands that companies through various tax schemes aren't paying 21% but you can't say that.
But the one I want to talk about is the 10 year plan to increase IRS funding to update incredibly outdated systems and increase enforcement. This was a good measure. And you can tell because the Republican Party lost their minds. They fairly successively propagandized it as the IRS hiring 80,000 agents to go after Joe Q. Citizen. No, it was enforcement against the ultra-wealthy and corporations. So it was killed in 3 years under the guise of "saving money" as well as not persecuting average citizens (which it was never going to do).
It's particularly stupid because money spent on IRS enforcement pays for itself. It's been estimated every $1 spent recovers $7. It pays for itself. But there was no counter-messaging and Republicans could push it through under reconiliation.
Compare that to the 4 year $175 billion increase in ICE funding.
This is how income tax was sold to the American public. When it originally started it really only did effect the top earners, but as the years rolled on and inflation happened it impacted more and more people. The reality is these tools that target only the 'wealthy', if they're successful are used to target everyone.
[1] https://www.mamdanibulletin.com/p/everything-zohran-mamdani-...
The pendulum will swing back, and be the opportunity to prevent this from ever happening again.
(i like taxes, with them i buy civilization, although i prefer they pay for social services and improving quality of life of humans with said resources, not endless wars in the middle east and tax cuts for the wealthiest driven by old men, their ideology, and their egos [n=1, ymmv, my two cents])
If this merger is approved via consumer welfare standard, should it be contingent upon some constraints? For example, should DoorDash be restricted from participating in the market it coordinates? If it’s a near monopoly in some regions, how will price be controlled without market pressure?
Historically, antitrust action also considers economic opportunity: Bell/AT&T licensed Unix source code for a nominal fee, largely because the 1956 consent decree restricted Bell/AT&T from selling products outside telecommunications.
The bad news is the US has developed a deeply entrenched culture of non-enforcement of laws rich people do not like. Unfortunately, until the culture changes, market pressure is the only avenue for relief.
Their platform scopes and coordinates a market. They even recognize this in their announcement: "DoorDash and Instacart believe that communities benefit when Main Street competes"
it's bad if you're an investor I guess.
Yes. Instacart has low cost retailers like Walmart and Aldi in many areas, and their prices are generally better than Amazon groceries. Now Walmart does also have their own service, so technically you can do that, but then you're limited to just them.
I've heard of that being "a thing" where the brand wants to make sure their product is actually out on the shelves properly, so that Dasher probably got easy money verifying the store did their own job properly.
https://about.doordash.com/en-us/news/introducing-doordash-t...
I assume it's just their own version of Gigwalk (https://www.gigwalk.com/).
By the time the CEO bailed to OpenAI, the damage was done - billions of dollars of opportunity, totally wasted. She left an organization gripped with paralysis, apparently too broken to fix and remain independent.
On the other hand - she did a great job at marketing herself. I wouldn't even call her trajectory "failing upwards", she made her moves intentionally and did it well. Fuck the rest of us though, I guess.
I do wonder what percentage of their orders are McDonalds. I lived near one and the car traffic of vehicles with delivery placards was significant.
Which makes me wonder about pricing pressure that is often reported re: McDonalds, and yet people end up paying $30-40 for a $15 McDonalds order.
Don’t get it.
I do get it. If you just really dont want to spend time on getting/making your own food, dont care about the cost, and are willing to put up with the experience then it serves a purpose. There is also a difference between doing it regularly and rarely.
I'd wager most, although not all (reread this before replies of "but I ..."), of those people doing it regularly are lazy and making a bad financial decisions but thats on them.
>Don’t get it.
I get that it takes full advantage of human tendency to be lazy. A friends stepson works a crappy job seemingly to pay for his door dash. The kid saves almost no money and is always asking his mother for money here and there while living at home with no expenses outside of his door dash and video game purchases. He couldn't afford to buy a bicycle.
> My wife and I BARELY have time to go grocery shopping
If you can, take them grocery shopping with you. One parent stays at home doing stuff, the other goes grocery shopping with at least one kid.
In my experience kids at least 12-18 months old LOVE grocery shopping.
Get a big shopping cart, put them in that special seat facing you. Keep it concise, don't shop for more than 1 hour per round. Talk to them, explain what you're doing, give them harmless things to play with (a carrot, a celery bulb, a bag of rice, whatever). Have a little fun with the produce, they will love random things, for example that weird looking tomato.
It becomes even easier as they grow a bit.
The way I see it: customer service sucks real bad now. In San Francisco it sucks incredibly bad. Adding another layer of it is another place for things to get worse.
I completely understand how door dash is useful. But I've been so disappointed that I just don't consider it anymore
Stop entertaining your kid.
Your kid doesn't need to be entertained. They don't need the tv, a tablet, or a scheduled production put on by their parents.
Let them be entertain themselves. They are great at it.
They will be better behaved, they will be happier and more independent. You will enjoy spending time with your kids again.
Take them out. Let them wait in line. Let them sit at the table a bit. Do slow restaurants that aren't kid friendly.
Let them bring a few small non-electronic toys or a little book, or paper and crayons.
I guess I could like, get a shopping cart and spent an extra 40 minutes hauling stuff back and forth every time we wanted groceries, but even that would be somewhat dependent on weather; a delivery driver is not going to have to walk 40 minutes in heavy rain and can bring frozen goods in an amount of time that doesn't result in them being soggy or completely melted messes by the time they reach us.
basically the only things i bother online delivering grocery wise are bulky dry goods (e.g. paper towels)
I literally order from all of those companies as do 10s of millions of people if not more.
You couldn't torture that out of me.
Do you have regular groceries delivered?
I don't order artificial food on apps or go anywhere near the golden arches, but it amazes me that the majority of the app orders are for these chains that sell utter garbage.
It is a bit like a phone, you could open a book to read classic literature or you could doom scroll AI trash all day. For some reason the latter option is invariably chosen over the former.
The money is also ridiculous, I am not sure of golden arches prices with delivery and tip on top, I just don't live like that. However, I always cook from scratch with no animal products, just stodgy vegetables, and I am sure that my weekly food bill is going to be less than one delivered cold and late burger meal of no nutritional value.
Also shocking as a cooking person is how few McDonald's orders are sit down with people. We have ended up with people eating with their fingers in their solitary confinement cars with the worst junk food possible, whereas we once had dinner parties with a proper table, home cooked food of nutritional value, valued company, crockery, cutlery, etiquette and prayers to an imaginary god.
Even stranger is that there is no free healthcare in the USA. Eat this garbage and you have a healthcare bill coming for the obesity, saturated fats blocking arteries, cancer and the rest of the chronic diseases that go with artificial food.
This situation is a product of American corporate ways of doing things and hard to unpick, but with these delivery apps now worth billions, there is now another barrier between healthy eating since this silly gig economy now needs to be kept in existence since jobs and corporate profits depend on it.
I compared a meal I bought takeout the other day (by calling the place and walking over to pick it up) vs the same meal on Doordash.
* Direct: 56.28
* Doordash: 101.16
Nearly double. It can be hard to find out what the actual direct price is for some restaurants, but I'd encourage you to make the same experiment.
From Dominos you can get 10 pizzas delivered for not much more than that.
I wonder if DD is going to make a play for Lyft next, which they’re already in close partnership. The market consolidating to these 2 players (Uber and DoorDash) seems natural(?), for lack of better terms. Either way, it wouldn’t surprise me.
For context, I used to deliver pizzas in a the early 2000s. I made
$4-5 an hour
+ $1 per delivery
+ tips (~$3 average)
My typical night made me about $20/hour (3-4 deliveries per hour). Someone would order $20 pizza, pay $4 for delivery fee and tip (16% markup). Restaurant paid $1.5 per delivery (amortized $5/h). Everyone was happy.
If you look at it today, the typical take home for delivery people is still $20 (same from 20 years ago, not inflation adjusted).
Here is what typical order looks like today:
Pizza cost: $20
Delivery fee: $3-5
Service fee (10-15%): $2-3
Optional tip (15-20%): $3-4
Possible small order fee: $0-2
Total customer cost: $28-34 (40-70% markup)
Restaurant commission (15-30%): $3-6
Restaurant makes less, customer pays a lot more.
And these companies managing this workforce still manage to lose money! So where the hell is the money going??
I wrote more about it here
https://mleverything.substack.com/p/what-happened-to-food-de...
https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001579091/a4bcc10...
For the last 6 months ending June this year, they made $2b in revenue. They report the "cost of revenue" aka what they pay the "shoppers" aka laborers and businesses, plus any deals they made was around $500m, leaving a gross profit of $1.5b.
Then they spent $150m on operations (running the service) and customer support.
Then they spent $370m on R&D (software developers, product people, QA, executives)
Then they spent $460m on Sales and Marketing (adverstising, promotions, business deals, executives)
Then they spent $190m on General and Administrative (accounting, HR, business development, CEO, executives)
That left them with $250m of net profit. Oh, yeah, and they've paid out something like $10 billion in share buybacks in the last calendar year.
They spent three times what they pay their laborers across the entire world on JUST administrative costs. Any problem you have with laborers, or their insane fees, all goes into this corporate slush fund for the operators of this company and the higher-class workers. This is the rule, not the exception.
If you work for these companies, know you are paying your mortgage literally by the spines of the desperate workers your company decides it can exploit for the benefit of shareholders.
If you run the numbers it’s clear that DoorDash targets 18 an hour to pay folks, but pushes it up to time and a half when it’s busy, so 27 during the holidays. Thing is, you can force them to pay a little more than double when it’s really busy and get 40 an hour from them. People work really hard to hit those numbers regardless of the quality of service they provide in the end.
For instance, I can randomly be 20 minutes late to an order one day and the next that’s a contract violation, three of those and they might fire you, depending on how many drivers they have available at the time. But if you can be twenty minutes late to an order you can do Uber Eats at the same time, you do that for an hour and by law in California the minimum you can make is 46 bucks in SF.
Alright that was all really anecdotal evidence to say that most experienced drivers are probably making more than 20 an hour, the shit service you receive is also directly incentivized by the platforms adversarial relationship with the drivers.
The whole thing just really doesn’t work. They must really banking on the autonomous delivery robots to work out.
only the latter is true. the former is true only for a subset of restaurants.
While your old pizza place probably serves the same amount of pizzas as before, for other restaurants, not specialized in delivery, the number of meals they sell has exploded.
so restaurant make less money per meal, put they make more meals.
also while customers pay more, you could see it as the price of convenience and choice.
Making a phone call, then paying with cash, is just crazy efficient. What exactly have we even gained?
Are we really asking this question in the year of our Late Stage Capitalism lord 2026? Are we confused about the American Oligarchy working with private equity to dash all the labor gains of the mid-20th century?
It's going to billionaire's Yacht & Bunker funds. The gig economy is about inserting tech into the middle of a functioning system to extract wealth for 4-5 dudes' benefit.
Stop hand waving about capitalism. Give me a real answer.
Instacart has it's own unique offerings and propositions, hopefully those don't dissapear, they were invaluable during the pandemic.
As a thought experiment, we currently have a duopoly for ride share. Would we be better off if Uber were broken up into two platforms?
Obviously having one platform would be bad, since there would be no price competition, but what’s the optimal number? Surely, too many platforms would be bad, as the concentration of delivery workers would be terrible on each app, making the whole system inefficient (setting aside whether one things the system should exist at all).
DD's new metric no longer even lets you dispute reports that an order wasn't delivered, with the obvious issues that come from that: having accounts with other apps in good standing is necessary to maintain your income if and when something stupid happens.
They seem like near-identical businesses to me.
Still very similar
At the end of the day, I guess their real product is trust. I wouldn't give $50 to a random stranger and ask them to drive me to the airport, but I would give $50 to Uber so they can give $25 to the stranger. It sure seems like a lot to pay for trust, though.
#999999 on a white background is a 2.84:1 contrast ratio, when the minimum requirement for body text is 4.5:1. So this page technically violates the ADA and other accessibility laws.
2) Regulatory reviews typically take 6 months to a year. There is an opportunity cost to holding shares over this time, your capital is tied up in shares, when you could instead use the money to buy US 10-year Treasuries that yield around 5%.
Assuming the deal closes at $65 in 12 months, the present value of these shares is $65 / (1 + 5%) = $61.90
Also, the market has consistently undervalued Instacart since they went public to begin with, so why stop now? (signed, a not-at-all-bitter former employee)
First off, okay that's great but no one is telling you to go use them. You can continue living your life exactly as you were without needing to judge others who live their lives differently from yours.
Second, clearly there are plenty of people who do use them judging from this $17b acquisition that just happened.
You'll always get some people who argue that time is money and that the saved time that people have from ordering from these services is an opportunity cost. But the reality is I'd wager that for probably 99% of the population, this is actually not true and the economics doesn't work out favorably after accounting for all the fees.
So then, all that is really left is convenience. And personally, I don't really find it that convenient at all. Often times the time it takes for an order to land on your doorstep is meaningfully longer than it would have taken for you to drive to the store and pick it up yourself.
In other words - these services really just profit off of laziness. And the sad part is I think we're just promoting a lazy society overall with lots of the newer services being offered.
To say “ i can’t believe people use it “ is obviously a lie. It’s a magic food delivery machine. It’s the closest thing to the Star Trek Replicator we have .
I don’t like it, and you could make a million arguments about why it’s either bad, unhealthy, bad economics etc. But it’s perfectly obvious why the business is huge.
Virtue signaling.
I know why they do it, that doesn't mean I like how the world works.
Paying an extra $10-12 in tips and fees to have some courier a meal directly to your door is ridiculously cheap, a courier service would charge 4x as much for a similar courier trip.
Is it necessary? No. Unfortunately I don't think would be great as a utility because quality of service matters and unlike the actual utilities, there's a lot of arbitrariness to quality of the service.
Availability of vehicles for delivery purposes is an interesting proposition. Charge doordash a tax or fee to maintain a fleet of vehicles that would open flexibility in the job market. (Consider this for ride-sharing as well... basically just reinvented the taxi medallion system but maybe with less restriction).
It's a good system for aligning the costs with the people who use the service.
If you thought all tax money went into a big general bucket and the government decided what services to offer out of that, municipal garbage pickup does not work that way.
There couldn't be a free delivery service because the usage would be all over the place. Someone DoorDashing burritos for breakfast lunch and dinner 7 days a week would use it 20X more than someone doing their once-weekly grocery order. Subsidizing it would incentivize a lot of waste, traffic, vehicle usage, and other things that we actually don't want to incentivize people to use more of.
The only way this could work is with a substantial per-delivery fee, which gets us right back to what we already have with DoorDash.
And "should"... what?
Just saying, city run trash is far from universal.
I'm not going to pay taxes for a service I think shouldn't even exist! Let the (strikeout expletive) people who want this luxury pay for it - I don't want to subsidize them one bit.
(And I'm a pro-socialist who believes university education should be almost free, and we should have universal healthcare).
For the few who really, really can benefit (e.g. disabled), fine - they need to qualify and I'm happy for the city to subsidize them. For those who just don't want to go out and do groceries? No. Way.
- in the past few years, orders are frequently not received.
- in the past few years, fruit/produce is often covered in mold, rotten, or otherwise unacceptable.
- in the past few years, delivery time estimates are frequently missed.
- in the past few months, customer support got significantly worse and came to resemble the bad attitude and general grudging unhlelpfulness of AirBNB's support team.
I think the main issue has been a big shortage of supply of workers who are willing to do the job and who can do it well. Often times the person delivering the order (and the order itself) smells strongly of cigarette smoke, and increasingly I've had drivers refuse to bring the order to the door, etc.
Add to that the impact of the labor shortage on grocery stores that makes stocking less reliable and results in no availability of bags, greater chances of rotten produce, etc.
Instacart does stand behind it service and I have received full refunds for the non-delivered orders and the rotten produce, but such things must take a great toll on the profitability of the business.
The answer is not to find new pools of desperate people but to improve working conditions (pay, benefits) and on a macro level reducing cost of living so the people performing the work don't have to work so much they stop being able to.
The way you COULD do that is to reduce administrative cost. From their most recent filing, marketing costs them 1/4 of their revenue, R&D (software development) 1/5th, and operations and administration 1/8th each. Their cost of revenue aka what they pay to their "shoppers" aka lower-class labor and the businesses they integrate with is 1/4th of gross, barely a pittance compared to the slush funds for management and investor payouts.
Take a look yourself: https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001579091/a4bcc10...
Bottom line: they are making money hand over fist, with the vast vast majority not going to workers but the corporate employees and investors. Your issue with delivery drivers is an issue with the bottom-of-the-barrel treatment decided by management - they could solve this problem (EASILY), but they choose not to in order to pay for more corporate employees and to have more profit to shareholders. The numbers are clear as day.
There's a reason why supermarkets went from having different counters for asking for your stuff to having you pick out your stuff yourself.
Don't be surprised when the permanent underclass you depend on doesn't give a shit about your moldy strawberries.
Instacart is profitable, yea? So they don't want to provide a better quality service or they would offer greater incentives to workers.
I found her for free on Facebook posting in a community group. It is a high trust situation but I realize a lot of these extra fees are because we try to operate in a low trust environment, which is really not optimal. Being able to trust your community is much better for everyone.
This was never going to be sustainable long term based on the economics, it was a securities and investor grift. Those with stock did well (“the stock is the product”), consumers did well while the subsidies lasted, workers made the least gig platforms could offer, and the ride is coming to an end as true labor costs and regulations catch up. Similar with Uber and Lyft, and Airbnb. It was all a financialization play that worked under ZIRP but no longer works.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39074978 said it best:
“Businesses do not have an inherent right to exist. If you can't pay a living wage, comply with regulations, and be profitable, your business model is not valid and your business should fail and close.”
Strong case for B2B sales focus
I believe it has been passed down to you, either knowingly or not
Right?
My previous experience was any time something went wrong, no one would take accountability for it and at best I might get a partial refund but never a replacement order.
Having to do a bit more planning for meals is worth eliminating that aggravation from my life. Not to mention the shocking amount of money I'm saving.
With this merger I have a feeling that things are only going to go worse.
none of this instacart nonsense. because it's the actual grocery shop delivering your order - you're not up-charged, your groceries tend to be of good quality no breakage etc cz they want you to return.
with instacart it's pervase incentives all the way down - spoiled fruit - instacart can blame the grocer, breakages same. grocer doesn't even know who ordered.
That's rich! Communities benefit when small businesses compete against each other. Announced as part of a merger of two giant public companies.
A truly laughable fig leaf for the non-existent anti-trust regulators.
There is zero cost of building matching systems (maybe 200$ worth of Claude subscription). Drivers and restaurants will be better off if they build their own ones. These centralized platforms need to die ASAP.
A couple days after my wife launched her campaign, Instacart did a 180 and told her they had to fire her for running. Bad for business to run for office and criticize a Republican incumbent!
My wife was also pregnant and she told them. They fired her the next day.
Congratulations on the merger.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/12/15/instacart...
He called support who contacted the customer and said they were on their way and could he wait five minutes. Of course he did but 30 minutes went by.
Contacted support again who said customer would be there in five minutes but, 15 minutes later, support said to just take the goods back to the store.
He took the goods back to the store but the store refused to accept them. Support said he could just donate them or keep them.
Despite showing the back and forth text messages, he was deactivated for not delivering to the customer.
I think it's a fully justified reason. If I'm in a senior position and I say something that in someway hurts the company reputation/income, I would be fired. If the company liveness depend on me being fired, the I think the decision is justified.
Or are people so antisocial now that going and grabbing groceries yourself is too much to handle?
And fwiw, I’m not against delivery. I use Amazon fresh frequently but I would argue that is much more efficient. Dedicated drivers and warehouses optimized for grocery is societally useful.
Paying an immigrant worker half a dollar to drive some tacos to a member of the upper class when the math has never worked out in the immigrant’s favor seems… bad? Or atleast a good way to turbocharge inequality
I gift meals to people in other cities when they're in need (sick, childbirth, death in the family) and I'm not nearby to help.
I've had intense working situations where an extra hour of work was worth paying someone $30 to deliver my $100 of groceries.
We've frequently used DoorDash and other services for small business meetings where we wanted to provide lunch, or in some situations where we had to stay late (security incidents, etc) and wanted to provide the team with something better than pizza delivery.
However it's also scary to watch some people who will DoorDash whenever they feel like it without regard to the cost. I watched some eye-opening conversations among college students comparing how much they had spent on DoorDash in the past year, even though they were not in a financial demographic that should have been indulging in delivery.
Maybe you don't have kids or that busy of a schedule?
> are people so antisocial now that going and grabbing groceries yourself is too much to handle?
> Paying an immigrant worker half a dollar to drive some tacos to a member of the upper class when the math has never worked out in the immigrant’s favor seems… bad? Or atleast a good way to turbocharge inequality
Ok, but then...
> I use Amazon fresh frequently
So... you do seem to understand who uses these (it's exactly people like you), and you have an actual use case for using a grocery delivery service (since you use it yourself), but you just think that Amazon Fresh is a completely different experience and ecosystem than Instacart, that does not promote inequality, and isn't antisocial? Can you elaborate on your reasoning/sources? I wouldn't say Amazon is exactly known for its humane treatment of low-wage workers...
Like most things in life, it's not a matter of difficulty, as if I am so incapable of going to a grocery store to buy groceries and the undue hardship it will cause me. It's simply a matter of how I like to budget my time. I judge that the 30 minutes it can take to do groceries is better spent doing other things with my life.
There's also times when you have people over and don't want to leave to pick something up.
And times when you are too tired or sick and don't want to leave the house
So I honestly think they should be under heavy govt regulations or be co-owned by everyone in the supply chain. Or firm regulated to avoid overcharging for useless stuff, everyone loses out including these companies as in needing to compete with eachother they have to offer dozens of benefits offers etc to customers, and customers get shafted when they are the most desperate because making money from the desperate is the best money making formula in the valley atm.
I see and interact with hundreds of people a day. DoorDashers are the worst of the worst, by a mile. I cannot wait for the day DoorDash ceases to exist.
I can spot a DoorDasher from a mile away. There are three types of DoorDashers.
The first is the kind who is most likely not here legally. They come barreling into the store with their speakerphones turned up to the max as they yell into the phone to their wife/girlfriend in some other language (Venezuelan/Cuban?) the entire time. Without any attempt to look on their own, they find every worker they see and shove the phone in their face demanding and begging to have us do their job for them and find the items. Then they get in line, phone still blasting, and ignore you when you smile and say hello or ask them to touch a button on the screen or say “thank you, have a nice rest of your day”. This kind makes up probably about 70% of DDers. Mind you, I interact with non-English speakers all day. They make eye contact, they smile, they make an attempt. DoorDashers make zero attempt whatsoever and are extremely brash and rude.
The second is the citizens who cannot get a job anywhere else. These are all very clearly drug addicts and former convicts straight out of the halfway house who shop and deliver under the influence of every mixture of drug you can imagine. Really, really rough people. These people, too, also beg you to complete their entire shopping trip for them, but at least they understand English and make eye contact with you. These are about 20% of DDers.
The last group are the “okay” ones. These are decent everyday people who talk to you like a human being, smile, and are friendly. They only ask for help after they’ve clearly made an effort to find the items on their own. Unfortunately, this group makes up only about 10% of adders.
We got along just fine a few years ago when DoorDash didn’t exist. DD contributes to the anti socialization of the world, and it’s not a good thing.
Spanish.