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Senators ask FTC to investigate Instacart over 'tip baiting'
A group of US senators has called on the FTC to investigate Instacart and other grocery delivery services for allowing 'tip baiting' that stiffs couriers.
Many Instacart shoppers still don't have their COVID-19 safety gear
Many of Instacart's shoppers still don't have promised gear to protect against COVID-19, but that's partly intentional.
Amazon plans virtual grocery waiting lists to cope with surging demand
Amazon and Whole Foods will deal with a flood of grocery orders by giving people a 'place in line' for delivery windows.
Instacart hopes to expedite deliveries with 'first available shopper' option
Instacart is adapting to the pandemic with a flexible delivery option focused on speed over fixed schedules.
Online grocery deliveries are facing an unprecedented stress test
In the past few weeks, cities and states across the country have instructed people to stay home in order to slow the spread of the coronavirus. Going out for essentials like food is allowed, but that can be a risky proposition. Not only can grocery stores get crowded, social distancing protocol often means long lines just to get inside. The obvious alternative to all this is to shop online, but as several shoppers can attest, that experience can sometimes be even more frustrating. The state of online grocery deliveries is apparently a lot more fragile than anyone had anticipated.
Instacart workers go on strike after rejecting mild concessions
Instacart hasn't had success trying to avert a strike over a lack of COVID-19 protections. The Gig Workers Collective has declared that a shopper strike is "still on" after asserting that Instacart's concessions were inadequate. A change that sets the tip default to a customer's previous amount will likely offer "no meaningful benefit," the shoppers said, as that previous amount will frequently come from the pre-outbreak era. There's still no sick pay for workers who have to stay home due to health conditions that put them at high risk. The company also left hazard pay "completely unaddressed," according to the objectors -- an average pay per order of less than $10 still leaves shoppers "risking their lives for pocket change."
Amazon offers warehouse workers higher pay to handle Prime Now groceries
Amazon's focus on essentials during the COVID-19 pandemic has led it to offer special incentives to workers. Reuters has learned that Amazon is offering warehouse workers a $2 raise to $19 per hour if they're willing to pick and pack Whole Foods groceries for Prime Now. The company has already outlined plans to hire 100,000 workers to keep up with demand, but that clearly isn't enough in the very near term.
Amazon suspends Prime Pantry to handle its backlog of orders
If you're looking to order food online while you're holed up at home amid the COVID-19 outbreak, you won't be able to do so through Amazon's Prime Pantry for now. The company has paused new orders through the service, which offers household and non-perishable pantry items, for now as it fulfills its backlog.
Instacart employees in Chicago are the first to unionize in the US
Gig economy workers may have won an important, if conditional, battle in their push for better conditions. Instacart employees in the Chicago suburb of Skokie have voted to unionize through their local branch of United Food and Commercial Workers, giving them more collective bargaining power than they had before. The move only covers 15 staffers who operate at the Mariano's grocery store, but it's the first time Instacart employees have unionized in the US and could affect issues like turnover rates, work pacing and mysterious employee rating algorithms.
Walmart will test driverless grocery deliveries in Houston
Walmart is about to experiment with autonomous grocery delivery in a big way. The big-box retailer is launching a pilot program in Houston that will use Nuro's self-driving R1 vehicle to shuttle food from "select" stores to customers who've opted into the program. The companies didn't outline how customers would enroll, but Houstonians can expect service to start in the "coming weeks."
Lyft expands Grocery Access Program to Baltimore, Chicago and NYC
This spring, Lyft announced its Grocery Access Program, which provided low-income families in select cities a flat-rate ride to the grocery store. The company's goal is to make healthy food more widely available, charging an average of $2.50 per ride to partnered stores. (Lyft absorbs additional costs up to $16, so drivers have an incentive to participate.) Today, the company announced that the program will expand to serve residents in Baltimore, Chicago and the New York City area.
Instacart cuts quality bonuses for couriers
Instacart is still embroiled in pay disputes despite past dramas. Motherboard has learned that Instacart is scrapping a $3 quality bonus it provides to shoppers who receive five-star ratings. The incentive "did not meaningfully improve quality," according to email sent to workers, and will disappear on November 11th. There's no mention of a replacement. The timing is definitely raising concerns among workers, however.
Amazon-owned Whole Foods cuts medical benefits for part-time workers
Not all is well with Whole Foods in the Amazon era. The grocery chain has confirmed to Business Insider that it's cutting medical benefits for part-time staff who work a minimum of 20 hours per week. A spokesperson said Whole Foods was dropping the benefits as part of a move to a single part-time work structure that "better meet the needs of our business and create a more equitable and efficient scheduling model." The change takes effect January 1st, 2020, and is expected to affect roughly 1,900 workers, or just short of 2 percent of the total workforce.
Amazon boosts its UK grocery delivery service
Amazon's UK fresh food delivery service is rolling out to a number of new cities, including Glasgow, Newcastle and Liverpool. Rounding out the list is Sheffield and Portsmouth with more, currently unspecified, locations coming online later in the year. This is good news for Amazon as it tries to make a dent in the UK's deeply competitive grocery market, and for Morrisons, its retail partner. As part of the wider rollout, Morrisons gets the ability to sell its wares straight to Amazon customers through the Prime Now app and website.
The UK gets its first checkout-free grocery store
The days of spending your precious lunchbreak standing in line for a sandwich are increasingly numbered, as supermarket chain Sainsbury's has launched the UK's first ever till-free grocery store. The busy store in London's Holborn Circus has been given a mobile-first makeover, so customers can scan and pay for their goods via their smartphone, while staff previously chained to checkout areas are free to spend time helping customers on the shop floor.
Walmart to offer online grocery shopping with Google Assistant
Walmart customers once again will be able to voice-order their groceries with Google Assistant, another bid by the brick-and-mortar store to compete with Amazon. The retailer announced the partnership on Tuesday, and said it would gradually roll out the feature in the next few weeks. The development comes after Walmart unceremoniously left Google Express, Google's online shopping tool, back in January, reportedly to develop its own Google Assistant shopping feature.
Instacart revises pay policy after accusations of tip stealing
Instacart is learning a hard lesson about the importance of paying workers properly. The grocery delivery service is revising its pay policies for shoppers after complaints that it was counting customer tips toward its minimum pay goals -- as far as workers were concerned, stealing tips. From now on, tips will "always be separate" from Instacart's contribution if it has to compensate a shopper to reach minimum pay. Instacart is also raising the minimum pay for all order batches. Where it used to pay shoppers at least $3, it'll now offer $5 for delivery-only batches (where someone else has already picked the groceries) or $7 to $10 for situations where workers both shop and deliver.
Stop & Shop is bringing autonomous food stands to Boston
Forget self-driving grocery delivery cars -- Stop & Shop wants robotic vehicles to bring a chunk of the store to your door. It's launching autonomous grocery vehicles in the greater Boston area that will let you shop for produce, meal kits and "convenience items" (think bread and eggs) just outside your home. You just have to hail one of the Robomart-made cars through a mobile app, unlock the vehicle when it arrives, and pick your food -- a combination of computer vision and RFID tagging automatically flags your purchases. It's not quite Amazon Go on wheels, but it's close.
Amazon will build more Whole Foods stores to expand Prime Now
Amazon hasn't been shy about using Whole Foods stores to hawk its own wares, but now it's apparently building stores with that primarily in mind. Wall Street Journal sources have learned that the internet giant aims to build and enlarge Whole Foods locations around the US to put more people within reach of Prime Now's two-hour deliveries. The ultimate aim is to make Prime Now available at "nearly all" of Whole Foods' 475 US stores (plus new shops) where it's only available in slightly over 60 cities today.
Instacart’s grocery pickup service is live in a handful of cities
Instacart, known for its same-day grocery delivery services, is now giving customers the option of ordering their groceries and picking them up at the store later on. The company has been testing this service over the past few months, and now it's rolling it out to 25 markets across the US. "We want to make grocery shopping effortless by helping our customers get the groceries they need from the retailers they love," Instacart's chief business officer, Nilam Ganenthiran, said in a statement. "Our customers want choice and we're excited to now offer the pickup option they've been asking for."
