3 On Your Side: Grocery Shop With Instacart App
By Jim Donovan
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- Want to skip the hassle of making a trip to the grocery store? A new wave of delivery services are promising to give customers instant gratification. As 3 On Your Side Consumer Reporter Jim Donovan shows us, all you need is a smartphone.
Shae Inglin does it all. She says, "So I shop. I deliver. I bag the groceries."
She's one of 4,000 personal shoppers for Instacart, a mobile app that lets users grocery shop from their smartphones. It works a lot like Uber. Punch-in a zip code, select your items and delivery time. Shoppers like Inglin deliver everything right to the door in as little as an hour.
Instacart customer Sage Bearman says, "It's a massive convenience, and we're having a baby this spring, and I imagine we'll be using it even more."
Instacart is going head-to-head with same day delivery services from tech giants like Amazon and Google.
Instacart is not affiliated with one grocery store brand, so customers can get more variety.
Instacart shoppers are independent contractors. Inglin works part-time and says she gets paid per order or a percentage of the bill. According to Inglin, "I set my own schedule each week, and it's very, very flexible."
The first Instacart delivery is free, and costs between $3.99 and $5.99 after that.
Again, the Instacart app is zip code based. The service is not available in every area yet. But in Center City Philadelphia for example, Instacart allows you to shop from Acme, Superfresh, Whole Foods, even DiBruno Brothers and the vendors in Reading Terminal Market.