DC Attorney General Sues Instacart, Claiming it Deceived Customers Into Thinking Service Fees Would Go To Workers

District of Columbia Attorney General Karl Racine announced a lawsuit Thursday against Instacart, claiming the grocery delivery service collected millions of dollars by deceiving customers into thinking that an optional service fee would be used as a tip for workers, when it allegedly went to the company instead. From a report: The suit echos an earlier charge against food delivery service DoorDash. Racine sued DoorDash in November, alleging it pocketed tips meant for workers and deceived customers about where their money would be directed. According to a press release announcing the suit, Instacart used to provide consumers an option to tip at checkout, with a default rate of 10% that users could adjust. But in 2016, according to the attorney general's office, Instacart replaced the tip section with an optional service fee, placed in the same spot, with an adjustable 10% default rate. Instacart changed this practice in April 2018, according to the release, after media reports and contact from the attorney general's office. Racine's office alleges Instacart did not clearly disclose that those fees were optional and that they would cover Instacart's delivery and operating expenses.

Hardly enough.

[Type44Q]

Those Instacart execs need to face criminal charges for stealiing from their contractors, with separate counts for each fucking incident.

Re:Hardly enough MAGA.

[I'mjusthere]

If you are billionaire or a Christian Kook, that is good news.

For the rest of us, it is a disaster.

Re: Hardly enough MAGA.

[Type44Q]

I'm the farthest thing from either and while I'm no fan of Trump the man, I dislike Trump the President less and less as time goes on... with a few notable exceptions, particularly the matter of Palestine...

Re:

[fluffernutter]

The "notable exceptions" are areas where Trump had completely lost interest and his aides took care of it with other White House staff.

Re: Hardly enough MAGA.

[Type44Q]

I'd venture to guess Trump is his aides, - in a manner of speaking (and no, not like the Subway guy in South Park), despite a few appearances to the contrary. The puppet show's plot might currently include a "division within the intel community" but whoever's in the White House either dances to their tune or gets 'Kennedied.' That's how it's been, how it is and how it'll continue to be, and it's fucking retarded to think otherwise.

Wanna bet this would happen?

[war4peace]

They will settle, pay peanuts, come out cleaner than a virgin's hunny.

Hey guys

[OMBad]

....only got one more post on this account today until I can't post no more. Then I can fire up my Russian Troll sock puppet accounts. I just wanted to make this one comment for today:

TRUMP 2020!

Re:

[cayenne8]

Why aren't the antifa/blm people targeting these guys? It seems like it would be more effective to go after the sources of worker abuse and corruption than some random peasants.

Because they aren't really who they presend to be.

They don't give a fuck about SJW issues or equality, etc.

In large they are just cowardly anarchists that just want to see the world burn.

Otherwise, they'd not be targeting, primarily, the very folks they profess to be fighting for, and not destroying poor/minority owned neighborho

DC Attorney General?

[93 Escort Wagon]

What is Marvel's position on this?

No surprise. They're all a ripoff.

[dgatwood]

I keep looking at these delivery services with absolute shock at how much they pad their pockets. On average, food delivery seems to double the price by the time you add on all of their fees, whether you're placing a small order or a huge order. It's particularly amusing that they add the delivery fees to the total before computing the tip, so when you think you're giving an 18% tip, you're really giving more like a 30% tip. What's more infuriating is the realization that they do this to make up for the fact that they grossly underpay their drivers so that they can keep more of the delivery fees for their own corporate profits.

By contrast, a lot of food places around here have their own delivery services with much lower fees. Anybody going to any of these delivery services should always go to the store's website first, or else they're going to get massively ripped off.

I recently did a price comparison between the GrubHub website and a local restaurant, and the GrubHub prices were a whopping 23.95% higher than if I ordered the exact same food directly from the restaurant directly. The difference in item price was actually more than the delivery fee from the restaurant, i.e. their "free" delivery really means that they are hiding the delivery fees in the per-item price. So why would we pay money for this service? I'm a little confused.

Do you know what I want in a delivery service? The exact opposite of what they all provide. I want transparency an flexibility. For me, there are two things I want to be able to do:

• Universal pickup: I place an order at a restaurant by either calling the restaurant or ordering from their website online. I then contact the service to tell them what time to pick it up. They then estimate the time spent and driving distance so that I have an idea of what it will cost, but bill me for the actual time spent and driving distance, with the rates disclosed at the time of purchase.
• Universal shopping: I look at various stores' websites and make a list of items. I provide the list of locations, the list of items to pick up at each location, and whether any of them require refrigeration. They do the shopping (going to stores with refrigerated items last), bring back the food or whatever, and call me if they can't find something. The quoted fee is based on an estimated time per item and an estimated driving distance, again with all of those details disclosed. The fee charged is based on the actual time spent and driving distance.

That last one is a big one. When I go out to the store, I don't drive to Wal-Mart (2.0 miles), drive home, drive to Home Depot (2.8 miles), drive home, drive to Lowe's (2.6 miles), drive home, and drive to Lucky's (2.6 miles), and drive home. I drive to Lowe's (2.6 miles) on the way to Home Depot (.9 miles), swing around, drive a block out of the way to Lucky's (1.6 miles), go over to the freeway, go to Wal-Mart (3.7 miles), and then go home (2.0 miles). That's the difference between 20 miles entirely on city streets and just 10.8 miles of mixed city/highway driving.

It makes zero sense for all of these trips to be independent trips, but it seems like almost every single company has their own delivery service that only delivers stuff from a subset of stores, so you end up going to three different services just to get stuff delivered from Target, Wal-Mart, and CVS or whatever. And even with delivery services that let you order from more than one store, you can't mix things from two stores in the same order. It's a complete epic fail of inefficiency that is passed on to you as the consumer in the form of having to pay for twice the mileage and 3x the driving time.

Why can't we just have a personal shopper service that does whatever we ask them to do (within reason), and charges based on what they actually did, instead of a giant, steaming pile of complexity that hides the true costs in vague delivery fees and monthly subscription costs?

Re:

[dgatwood]

ROFL. I'm sure plenty of software engineers would eagerly quit their jobs if someone offered to paid them $60 an hour just to do shopping. That's almost $125,000 per year pre-tax.

Nobody, and I mean nobody, would pay 5x California's minimum wage (currently $12 per hour) just for somebody to pick things up for them (or at least not if you're being transparent about the costs). That's an absolutely silly hourly wage for what amounts to unskilled labor.

I'd expect something more along the lines of $15 per ho