Complaints about Instacart have a common thread: people are sick and tired of shoppers making bizarre substitutions and ignoring their instructions.
A Georgia woman reached the end of her patience with a Instacart shopper. Rather than cancel the order, complain, or just accept the mozzarella sticks she says he subbed for French toast sticks, she rolled up on him in Publix to give him the business.
In two TikToks, Dezzy (@dezzy_9strong) films herself arriving at Publix and letting the man have it.
“POV: pulling up on my Instacart shopper because I’m sick of being ignored,” she writes in the on-screen caption.
Dezzy says she’s “frustrated” with her Instacart shopper. “Chicken strips in place of ground turkey is diabolical!” she writes of another purported substitution. “The store was not out of all ground turkey.”
She further accuses the shopper of “ignoring” her.
“I was furious. Y’all have no idea how many shoppers ignore me when trying to correct substitutions,” she later claims.
Instacart shopper showdown
The video shows Dezzy marching into the Publix and confronting the shopper in an aisle.
“What are you doing?” she demands, then picks up a container of ice cream from the cart. Dezzy tells him it’s “melted” and adds, “You still have 69 items left to shop.” She repeats this multiple times during their exchange.
“You got all my frozen items in this cart. I don’t understand. Why?” she continues.
Clearly taken aback, the man mumbles some things that the camera doesn’t pick up. She claims he said he doesn’t speak English well—an excuse she doesn’t accept.
“I’m texting you and I’m telling you what to do and you’re still getting what you want me to get,” she tells him. “It’s my money. You can’t make me get this [expletive].”
In captions, she says that the Instacart order was $560 worth of groceries, she wants what she paid for, and says she was a shopper during the pandemic.
In the second post, Dezzy follows the Instacart shopper through the store and takes multiple items from the cart and puts them back on the shelf. She tells the man that she isn’t planning to accept the order. Eventually, he gives up and leaves the cart.
“They still would not let me cancel my order!” she seethes.
Dezzy then follows him to the parking lot, still filming.
After what she describes as “20 minutes of arguing with the app,” she says Instacart let her cancel the order. She resubmitted it and says a female shopper got her everything on her list, albeit with some acceptable substitutions, such as the same items in different brands.
A valid crashout or taking things too far?
Confronting a person who works in customer service often severely divides your audience.
That wasn’t the case with Dezzy’s self-described “crashout.” People were overwhelmingly united in agreeing that she was in the right.
Her posts resonated with viewers, who have watched the first one 1.3 million times and the second 330,000 times.
Many accused her Instacart shopper of being lazy and incompetent.
“He just didn’t care for real,” @lbrown636 wrote.
@Eb added, “They need literacy tests for all these delivery apps. It’s ridiculous.”
Multiple people who say they work in grocery stores accused Instacart of having incompetent employees.
“As a Publix employee, I highly encourage ppl not to use Instacart,” wrote one. Another described Instacart shoppers doing five orders in one trip and just leaving the items in carts at the front of the store.
Complaints about male shoppers were also a common thread in the comments on Dezzy’s posts.
“You know how Uber & Lyft have women only options? Instacart needs that too,” rownmarqet opined. Over 8,000 people liked this comment. Responses include accusations of “weaponized incompetence” and offers to “pay extra” to choose your Instacart shopper’s gender.
“Once I see that a male shopper is my designated shopper, I push back my delivery time 1 hr,” Pickle Rick advised. “And then a woman is always usually assigned as my next shopper.”
What happens if your Instacart order is wrong?
On its website, Instacart says that customers have “up to 3 days after pickup or delivery to self-report an issue with your order.”
Issues include items that are missing, damaged, incorrect, expired, late, wrong, poorly substituted, and spoiled.
If an item is missing, spoiled, damaged, or “otherwise unusable,” Instacart says you can request a refund or credit.
In Dezzy’s case, she says the company went a step further. She says Instacart banned the shopper from her account. “But it took an act of congress,” she adds.
That wasn’t the end of the saga, however. In a subsequent post, Dezzy says Instacart emailed her, albeit after she canceled her membership.
“They deactivated my account,” she writes in the post. “…They blamed me, called me aggressive.” She disagrees, arguing in the caption that her behavior was “mid” for her.
Once again, people were on her side in the comments.
“No accountability whatsoever of them!” Ebony Star wrote. Another accused Instacart of a “microaggression,” and praised her for “whisper yelling” and not causing a scene.
“I didn’t see anything aggressive in the videos smh,” SKeyH4 agreed.
Dezzy didn’t respond to a direct message seeking comment. Instacart did not respond to the Mary Sue’s email about the incident.
@dezzy_9strong @Instacart Your platform makes it very hard for customers like me. Most of my instacart shoppers do this. When we try to reach out all we get is a computer who says we can not cancel the order. The substitutions be way off and the app should not even allow them to scan frozen items until everything else is shopped! This is very unacceptable. Then you wont refund my money because the item was substituted! #instacart #fyp ♬ original sound – dezzy_9strong
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