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Comment by schoper | Hacker News Reader

Instacart's per-item prices tend to be far higher. I might use them if they raised the delivery fee and removed the item price gouging.

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How would consumer opinion be effected by the change?

I wonder if, as a consumer, I would resent seeing a "service fee" as opposed to seeing higher priced goods. Perhaps, subconsciously, people ignore the item price and are looking for the "fee". In this case, their pricing is their marketing.

I'd be quite interested in whether they A/B tested the two strategies.

I think the average InstaCart customer doesn't realize that per-item prices are higher. I didn't.

I've been passively aware of it, but don't really care - most items are not really egregious. Because Safeway's prices are so volatile with sales and Instacart doesn't seem to really reflect that, it ends up balancing out pretty well (plus, of course, the huge convenience factor)

EDIT: Eridius is correct below. Instacart is just mislabeling their product pricing. The 3 lbs. ribeye shows up as $30 per lb., but is actually $30. I'll bet they are doing the opposite as well (buying 0.5 lbs. of anything will look like an insane deal).

ORIGINAL POST:

I'm looking at some $30/lb ribeye steak right now. The same "extra value" package at Safeway was $10/lb.

Price-tripling is unacceptable to me.

Are you sure you're looking at the same thing? I just compared some ribeye "extreme value" steak on Instacart vs Safeway's website. Instacart has the 1.50LB package at $15.74/lb. Safeway has it at $9.99/lb as the Safeway Club price (for some reason it won't show me the non-club price). That's a 50% increase, against Safeway's discounted price.

Except oops, no it's not. Instacart does say "per lb", but if I add it to my cart, the final price is actually $15.74, not the expected $23.61. Which compares to Safeway's club price of $14.99. That's a 5% increase, which seems quite reasonable.

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