Instacart offers “personal shoppers” option of employee status

Grocery delivery company Instacart has announced that it is now giving its “personal shoppers” in some cities the option of converting from contractor to employee status – but its “drivers” will continue to be classified as independent contractors. As previously reported, the employment status of people working in the crowdsourcing / “sharing economy” sector has become a key issue, following the recent ruling by the California Labor Commission that Barbara Ann Berwick, a driver who had made deliveries for Uber for a couple of months, was entitled to be regarded as a former employee, rather than a contractor.

In a statement published yesterday (22 June), Instacart said that it had announced its new policy “after a successful pilot in Boston”.

“As Instacart grows, and we continue to learn what makes the best experience for our customers, we are constantly looking for ways to improve our service,” said Apoorva Mehta, Founder and CEO of Instacart. “When you look at the difficulty of shopping, picking and delivering items such as fruit or eggs that need to be carefully selected, you realize that grocery shopping can be complicated. For this reason, we want to provide supervision and training, which can only be done with employees.

“We began experimenting with part-time employee roles in Boston,” continued Mehta, “and the data from our pilot showed that this change improved the quality and efficiency of order picking and made for a better customer experience. We’re excited to be able to expand this option to other cities.”

The Instacart statement added: “This change goes hand-in-hand with Instacart’s recent decision to move towards a business model that splits its shopper and driver roles. In the past, the Instacart worker picking a customer’s order also delivered it. In recent months, Instacart has moved to divide those roles, with in-store shoppers who pick and prepare orders in stores and drivers who then deliver the orders. Those embedded shoppers are now Instacart employees, while the drivers, and those who to-date continue to both shop and drive, are independent contractors. Instacart has found that this model improves efficiency in both order picking and delivery.

“Both roles have been staffed by independent contractors. Effective today, starting in Chicago, those independent contractors embedded in stores will have the option to become Instacart part-time employees.”

Instacart said that, based on the data from the Boston pilot, it expects that more than 75% of its current in-store contractors will opt to take part-time employee status.

Instacart said that it “plans to roll out this option to more of its independent contractors in some of the other cities it serves in the coming months and will make permanent the changes that were already in place in Boston”.