Nancy Edmonds Hanson
nancy.edmonds.hanson@gmail.com

When the Instacart shopping service wheeled up to Moorhead and Fargo two years, it seemed like little more than a nice idea … a convenience for shut-ins, perhaps, and mothers overstocked with rambunctious kiddos.
Today? For many, it’s a necessity.
Five weeks of mandated stays at home have brought the grocery shopping and delivery service to the forefront of many Moorheaders’ kitchens. While they shelter at home, heeding the governor’s order to stay there, they have been placing their orders at Hornbacher’s, Family Fare and Aldi’s via the internet, along with Target, Costco and CVS Pharmacy.
Online, they wander the stores’ virtual shelves from their own kitchen or couch, tapping keys on their tablets or phones to put everything from fresh produce to favorite brands of pantry staples and laundry supplies into a digital shopping cart. They pay by debit or credit card, then sit back to await the results, when a helpful shopper will drop off their order outside their door.
A legion of mostly young people are making home-delivery magic seven days a week in Moorhead and the surrounding area. “There’s no way to really tell how many of us are doing this,” says Nicole Kolbe of Moorhead, who with her husband Kasper has been an Instacart shopper for less than a year. She fulfills online orders nearly full-time, completing four or five orders five days a week.
“My husband spotted an online ad looking for shoppers awhile ago, and then I got involved, too,” Nicole explains. “We both love it. At first, it was a great way to make a little extra cash” – she on a break from her regular work as a professional nanny and home manager, he on his weeks off from the North Dakota Air National Guard. “But now it means something much more.”
In a time of pandemic, she points out, even ordinary tasks like grocery shopping and picking up prescriptions can be difficult for people whose age or health puts them at special risk. Her work with Instacart has become, for her, a calling: “My mother lives alone in Tennessee. If I had somebody to do her shopping for her right now, I’d give a million dollars. If I
Instacart orders are filled by local “gig workers,” self-employed individuals who pick and choose assignments served up by a referral company’s online app. Like restaurant deliveries by GrubHub and the Uber ride-sharing service, unseen national networks match up local clients with their service providers. Customers pay by credit card at the time they place their orders. Workers on the ground are compensated directly by each company, generally through direct deposits once a week.
Their earnings depend on a formula established by the provider. For Instacart, it’s weighted according to the number of items ordered and their weight, with an additional charge for each mile the shopper drives. And then, of course, there are tips added by customers themselves – not mandatory, but very much appreciated.
Because the services deal directly with each of their shoppers with minimal human interaction, Nicole says, each of them is theoretically a lone wolf in the field. “But that’s not really true,” she adds. “We spend a lot of time in the stores and get to know each other. We’re like a family, and most of us like to help each other out whenever we can.
“I can be kind of like a mother to some of the younger shoppers. I’m a pretty adept shopper. I know where to find things,” she says. That’s not true of some of her fellow shoppers, many of them new to the semi-professional pursuit of groceries. “They’ll be wandering around looking confused – ‘where’s the Jell-o?’ They tell me, ‘I’ve never even walked down the baking aisle before.’ If I see them struggling, I’m happy to help them out.”
When a newbie signs up to be a shopper, they receive some guidance from Instacart but then are on their own. With no wider forum available to answer questions and offer tips, Nicole has set up a closed Facebook group, Fargo-Moorhead Instacart Shoppers, where they can compare notes and get guidance. In just three weeks, it has added nearly four dozen members. They range from “our veteran,” she says, a man who has been Instacarting for the entire two years it has operated here, to some who signed up a day or two ago.
The golden age of Instacart shopping, several members observe, happened about the same time, when Gov. Tim Walz’s executive order for Minnesotans to stay close to home brought a flood of orders to the site. The traffic was so heavy that the same-day delivery that has been a hallmark of the shopping service has turned into one or two days.
That popularity presented some problems, Nicole acknowledges. Participating stores generally have up-to-date inventories of their stock at the time customers decide what they want. Two days later, when a shopper is filling out their batch, the situation may be somewhat different. “We can talk” (that is, text) “back and forth to let them know what’s going on,” she explains. “If a certain brand or size is out, I’ll ask what they’d like to substitute. If the bananas look especially green that day, I can send them a photo to see what they think.”
The shopper scans each item as she puts it in her cart; the app itself approves it or sends an error message if the quantity, size or product doesn’t match the order. Then, when all are in hand, it messages, “Your order is complete.” She wheels up to the store’s cashier and pays with an Instacart-issued credit card or Apply Pay on her iPhone, either one preloaded with her customer’s payment. Then she drives to the client’s address and hauls the grocery sacks to the door. Finally, she sends her customer a snapshot of the bags in the doorway to demonstrate that they’ve arrived.
It’s a smooth system, by and large, though not without a kink or two. Nicole points to one – the practice called tip-baiting. “It doesn’t happen too often here, but we do see it occasionally,” she says. Since customers’ promised tips show up along with the size of their batches on the Instacart app, some shady operators promise an apparently outsized tip. A shopper jumps at filling that order. But then, when the job is done, the customer eliminates the tip from their account.
“It has only happened to me twice,” Nicole reports. “One time, I filled a large order – seven cases of Dr. Pepper, seven other bags of groceries – hauling them up three flights of stairs. By the time I got home, the tip had disappeared. Another day, I drove out to well beyond the Walmart on 52nd Avenue in a snowstorm. The tip was erased when I was only a few blocks away. Customers do have three days to adjust the gratuity based on the service they receive, and we want to do the best we can. But when you’ve given them exactly what they wanted and gone the extra mile, that’s just abuse.”
Meanwhile, she and many of her unseen colleagues feel they’re providing a necessary and usually much-appreciated service to the community. She takes pride in going the extra mile for customers who need something special, even if they never know her name and she may never work with them again. (Instacart customers cannot request a particular shopper.) “Our society has never gone through something like this before,” she says. “This is one thing I can do to keep people safe. I’m proud to do it.”