HISTORICAL FACTS: Instacart shoppers fails - The Untold Story

Instacart in a nutshell is a three sided operation. You pick a store and load up a virtual cart, a nearby personal shopper accepts your order, and that person walks the aisles picking your groceries before handing them off or driving them to your door, often within an hour or two according to Instacart's own explainer. It sounds simple because in theory it is.

Someone reads through your list, looks for a reasonable replacement if something is unavailable, checks out with a company issued card, and brings everything to you. In practice, that someone is a real person moving fast through a store they may not know well, trying to satisfy a stranger's specific instructions, a ticking delivery window, and their own performance rating all at the same time. That is where things start to go sideways.

The biggest source of chaos by far is substitutions. If an item is out of stock, shoppers are supposed to text a suggested swap and let the customer approve or decline it. Sometimes that works exactly as intended. Other times the substitution logic seems to come from a random number generator.

One Redditor recounted ordering a simple bag of lettuce, only to receive no lettuce at all and, inexplicably, a box of molasses cookies instead, a story Cheapism collected among a whole pile of similarly baffling shopper fails. Other customers online describe swaps that miss by an entire food category, cottage cheese standing in for ricotta or turkey pepperettes replacing pork ones, regardless of brand or flavor.

Sometimes shoppers skip the ask first step entirely. A Colorado woman named Roxanne Nice told 9News she ordered around forty dollars worth of groceries through a King Soopers order fulfilled by Instacart, then later noticed her card had been charged more than one hundred and forty dollars.

Nearly every item on her list had quietly been marked out of stock and swapped for pricier replacements she never approved and never got a text about. Instacart told the outlet that shoppers caught doing this can be removed from the platform. Ignored instructions have become their own genre of complaint.

The good news is that Instacart does offer a bit of a safety net. Customers get three days after delivery or pickup to report missing, damaged, expired, late, or badly substituted items directly through the app, and eligible issues can lead to a credit or a refund, according to Instacart's help center. If a shopper sends something wildly wrong or extra, customers are only charged for what they actually ordered, and Instacart says the mystery items can simply be kept, donated, or tossed.