If a customer has tipped a percentage of their order total and the store is out of five items, we lose that money. It became more stressful to shop, not only because of the health concerns, but because stores were out of things constantly and Instacart’s stock often does not align with the store’s inventory. I want to say it was March 2020 when we were instructed to leave orders at the door of people’s houses and send a photo. I could always do better, go faster, and make more if I worked harder. It was almost like a drug in the beginning. I thought it could always be something I did on the side if I wanted a little extra cash. I found it great to make people happy and do something they needed. Two weeks to a month after I started, I thought it was amazing. I started doing Instacart 40 to 50 hours a week in January 2020. Construction got severely delayed, and it became clear that it might not happen. I was set to begin working at an events space. I started serving in various restaurants very young and kind of progressed up the ladder. In college, I studied interior design and psychology. I’m originally from northwest Iowa and settled in Des Moines 15 years ago. This is what it was like to find herself beholden to an algorithm in the midst of a pandemic. As an “independent contractor” in the gig economy, Alice lacks basic labor protections, including the right to form a union or receive overtime pay. The company’s thirtysomething founder, Apoorva Mehta, is now a billionaire many times over. In March, a new funding round doubled Instacart’s valuation to $39 billion. They, too, are beholden to a line of code of someone else’s design. There are only the anonymous agents she chats with through an app. When something goes wrong, there is neither an office Alice can walk into nor a person she can call. You can find the full package here.Īlice, a former Instacart worker who asked to use a pseudonym to protect her from potential retaliation from the company, has a boss. But this package-through a series of worker stories as told in their own voices, interviews with experts, and dissections of media narratives-attempts to make sense of the moment. In our January + February 2022 cover story, we attempted to answer a simple question: What the hell happened to labor since the pandemic began? It wasn’t one thing.
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