thinking about the time my instacart shopper got Cask of Amontillado’ed
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thinking about the time my instacart shopper got Cask of Amontillado’ed

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Instacart reaches into your pocket and lops a third off your dollars
I'm at the end of my tour for my new book, the international bestseller Enshittification. My last two stops are CCC in Hamburg, Dec 27-30 and the Tattered Cover in Denver (Jan 22). Hope to see you!
There's a whole greedflation-denial cottage industry that insists that rising prices are either the result of unknowable, untameable and mysterious economic forces, or they're the result of workers having too much money and too many jobs.
The one thing we're absolutely not allowed to talk about is the fact that CEOs keep going on earnings calls to announce that they are hiking prices way ahead of any increase in their costs, and blaming inflation:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/20/quiet-part-out-loud/#profiteering
Nor are we supposed to notice the "price consultancies" that let the dominant firms in many sectors – from potatoes to meat to rental housing – fix prices in illegal collusive arrangements that are figleafed by the tissue-thin excuse that "if you use an app to fix prices, it's not a crime":
https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/25/potatotrac/#carbo-loading
And we're especially not supposed to notice the proliferation of "personalized pricing" businesses that use surveillance data to figure out how desperate you are and charge you a premium based on that desperation:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/05/your-price-named/#privacy-first-again
Surveillance pricing – when you are charged more for the same goods than someone else, based on surveillance data about the urgency of your need and the cash in your bank account – is a way for companies to reach into your pocket and devalue the dollars in your wallet. After all, if you pay $2 for something that I pay $1 for, that's just the company saying that your dollars are only worth half as much as mine:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/24/price-discrimination/
It's a form of cod-Marxism: "from each according to their desperation":
https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/11/socialism-for-the-wealthy/#rugged-individualism-for-the-poor
The economy is riddled with surveillance pricing gouging. You are almost certainly paying more than your neighbors for various items, based on algorithmic price-setting, every day. Case in point: More Perfect Union and Groundwork Collaborative teamed up with Consumer Reports to recruit 437 volunteers from across America to login to Instacart at the same time and buy the same items from 15 stores, and found evidence of surveillance pricing at Albertsons, Costco, Kroger, and Sprouts Farmers Market:
https://groundworkcollaborative.org/work/instacart/
The price-swings are wild. Some test subjects are being charged 23% more than others. The average variance for "the exact same items, from the exact same locations, at the exact same time" comes out to 7%, or "$1,200 per year for groceries" for a family of four.
The process by which your greedflation premium is assigned is opaque. The researchers found that Instacart shoppers ordering from Target clustered into seven groups, but it's not clear how Instacart decides how much extra to charge any given shopper.
Instacart – who acquired Eversight, a surveillance pricing company, in 2022 – blamed the merchants (who, in turn, blamed Instacart). Instacart also claimed that they didn't use surveillance data to price goods, but hedged, admitting that the consumer packaged goods duopoly of Unilever and Procter & Gamble do use surveillance data in connection with their pricing strategies.
Finally, Instacart claimed that this was all an "experiment" to "learn what matters most to consumers and how to keep essential items affordable." In other words, they were secretly charging you more (for things like eggs and bread) because somehow that lets them "keep essential items affordable."
Instacart said their goal was to help "retail partners understand consumer preferences and identify categories where they should invest in lower prices."
Anyone who's done online analytics can easily pierce this obfuscation, but for those of you who haven't had the misfortune of directing an iterated, A/B tested optimization effort, I'll unpack this statement.
Say you have a pool of users and a bunch of variations on a headline. You randomly assign different variants to different users and measure clickthroughs. Then you check to see which variants performed best, and dig into the data you have on those users to see if there are any correlations that tie together users who liked a given approach.
This might let you discover that, say, women over 40 click more often on headlines that mention kittens. Then you generate more variations based on these conclusions – different ways of mentioning kittens – and see which of these variations perform best, and whether the targeted group of users split into smaller subgroups (women over 40 in the midwest prefer "tabby kitten" while their southern sisters prefer "kitten" without a mention of breed).
By repeatedly iterating over these steps, you can come up with many highly refined variants, and you can use surveillance data to target them to ever narrower, more optimized slices of your user-base.
Obviously, this is very labor intensive. You have to do a lot of tedious analysis, and generate a lot of variants. This is one of the reasons that slopvertising is so exciting to the worst people on earth: they imagine that they can use AI to create a self-licking ice-cream cone, performing the analysis and generating endless new variations, all untouched by human hands.
December 9th, 2025
Worse, about a third of DoorDash jobs paid less than $0 after accounting for basic expenses
“Working Washington crunched pay data from 229 delivery jobs from Dashers around the United States, and found that the workers were making an average of $1.45 an hour, after taking into account the costs of mileage, additional payroll taxes that add up for independent contractors, and the lost work time as workers wait for the next job.”
Shipt and Instacart provide better pay and benefits. But they could do better.

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just as a head's up, instacart and doordash add $0.30 to item price for every item from Aldi in the US East Coast area.
if you depend on order pickup or delivery for disability reasons, Aldi might be the store worth saving in-person energy for if you place larger orders.
(instacart and doordash don't do this for all stores. Walmart pickup direct from its own site doesn't add anything to items.)
for sure