Instacart’s new pay model — tip-taking no longer included! — has rolled out, and the company’s CEO put up a piece on Medium , which includes several screenshots intended to illustrate how it all works.
And those screenshots offer an interesting window into what the company thinks work is worth.
We ran the numbers through our calculators, which account for what Instacart is actually paying. Our calculators exclude tips from pay calculations (because tips are supposed to be on top), count mileage separately (because it’s supposed to be a reimbursement), and account for the added expense of payroll taxes that contractors have to cover on their own.
And here’s what we got — from the CEO’s own selected illustrations.
This job would likely take between 45 minutes and an hour and 15 minutes, according to estimates from longtime Instacart workers. Assuming it took the minimum time, that works out to just $8.72/hour from Instacart after a minimal accounting of expenses.
This job would have likely taken between 30 minutes and 45 minutes, according to estimates from longtime Instacart workers. Assuming it took the minimum time, that works out to just $5.69/hour after expenses.
This hypothetical job would pay a little bit better: $13.96/hour after expenses.
But if the customer didn’t rate the experience 5 stars for whatever reason, that $3 “Quality Bonus” goes away and the job pays just $9.81/hour after expenses.
And yes it’s true — these jobs are in fact cherry-picked. They might not even be real!
Which is why they’re all the more important — because they’re the illustrations chosen by the company itself to illustrate what it pays.
And what they pay is in the single digits per hour.