About 160 retailers across the country partner with San Francisco-based Instacart. It's a pretty valuable tool for grocers to dip their toes into e-commerce without the infrastructure and labor spending developing a program in-house can bring.
But it's not a perfect system, though.
This fantastic article from Tech Crunch lays out some of the strengths and weaknesses of Instacart.
Not surprisingly, produce and inventory management are a big problem for consumers, grocers and the Instacart shoppers stuck between them.
In a store, grocery shopping can become a truly visceral experience. The scent of fresh baked bread wafts in the air near the bakery. You hear the thump of a thumb on a cantaloupe, feel the fresh, ripe tomatoes in your own hands. Watch your deli meat sliced right before your eyes. To some, this is worth the effort of shlepping to the grocery store when you think about the fact that all this food will eventually be in your mouth.
Moving the experience over to the internet is, by comparison, so much more impersonal. It becomes about browsing a database, clicking, and waiting with blind faith that the person doing your shopping cares as much as you do.
An Instacart shopper gets paid per order, for the most part, and time is money. It's hard to balance picking for a picky consumer and the shopper making a profit.
Quick rarely translates to quality.
Every practiced grocery shopper knows that the best produce is rarely sitting on the top of the heap. And beyond that common knowledge, cooks who go shopping know the difference between an avocado that is ready today vs. an avocado that will be ready for fajita night on Wednesday, and pick their produce accordingly.
Instacart shoppers aren't as concerned with these somewhat trivial matters as you would be if you were doing your own shopping. Their goal is to turn around this order and get started on the next.
Out-of-stocks, substitutions and inventory inconsistencies are the bane of a retailer's existence, and they're particularly challenging when you try to lay a third party software provider over a retailer's legacy system, too.
There is no one, centralized system that helps grocery stores track their inventory. Each uses their own system, from papers on clipboards to spreadsheets to legacy software programs. Instacart takes this inventory information in whatever form the grocery store uses, making an already difficult situation of grocery store inventory that much more impossible.
What's in the future for retailers an Instacart? Is it a Bandaid we'll use while we parse out our own systems, or will we find a way to integrate their system with ours for a more seamless transaction?