Instacart - Stolen deliveries, poor customer service - AVOID!

My advice... Use Instacart as a $50 referral scheme, or, get your introduction freebies and MOVE ON!

The first two orders I made, my groceries were never delivered. The first order, the person claimed to deliver them, but didn't. I told Instacart to ban this person from making future orders from me. Low and behold, this did not happen, and this same person re-stole my second order! This driver is now banned, so that is good, but why let it go this far?

I must have contacted Instacart over 40 times over the 4 orders I made. That's 10 emails per order. This isn't a very time saving experience that was originally advertised by Instacart. I might as well go to the store myself.

I then has issues with support providing me credit as a 'sorry that your orders were stolen' coupon. The coupon didn't work when added over $35 to my cart. I had to contact them again and spent all morning today on this. When they finally fixed this bug, my free delivery went away.

Both the website and Android apps have many issues and bugs. The 'Sort by price' filters really do not work at all! Try for yourself! The Android app has a search bug where the search is hidden after the first search, so you have to guess what you search for. There is also an issue with wrong prices and wrong quantities on the website. At Smith's a TWO GALLON milk is $2.14. They WILL NOT deliver this, they will deliver half a gallon and expect you to deal with it. I told Instacart about these issues weeks ago and nothing has been done about it. The list really goes on, I could be here all day!

The support tickets are annoying because I'll get an agent who is really good and understanding, I reply to them, then some idiot in support takes over my case EVERYTIME I reply. They DO NOT READ the entire support chain, and I go round in circles again. This happen EVERY response!

The latest order, somebody thought it would be a good idea to replace a 50lb bag of rice with a 5lb bag. The 5lb bag was also a crappy value per oz. That's 10 times smaller that I wanted. Why didnt they chat with me using the chat feature? I can appreciate Instacart targets cheap people with low ambitions as drivers as they promise the self-employment dream that some job-hunters crave.... But this detriments the entire process. Orders get stolen, drivers get annoyed and damage your property. I mean, really!

Icing on the cake... You will get many emails containing the following: "If you have any feedback on how we can make Instacart Express better, just reply to this email!". Each time, the email will be sent from a no-reply email and your nice informative response will get bounced back, or, forgotten and lost forever.

Their support service is called the "happycustomers" team. I think they call it this so you go easy on them! They promise a 2 hour response, but you WILL end up waiting over 12 hours on some occasions, and when your groceries are missing, 12 hours is a long time to wait wondering where your money and your goods have gone!

Just go to the store yourself! You'll be glad you did!