Which is precisely why Zohran is necessary.
post
I'm just getting angrier and more pitchforky as I get older! If my old teachers who said that shit were still alive I'd be shrieking how no, no I did absolutely not get more conservative damn it.
We need more competently run labor unions in NYC. Thank God 1199 just ousted their scumbag thief president.
That stain had the union backing Cuomo of all people.
It's not even that much of a gap. They'll crush their employees under the weight of dozen elephants if it nets them an extra 5%.
Someone mentioned "growing more conservative" could mean holding on to the gains, specifically material gains. Like, one of the key contributing factors to the housing crisis is NIMBYism. Plenty of house owners are maybe socially progressive and feel bad about injustice; but many of them, especially old people, vote down proposals to build affordable housing because it affects their property value. If I bought a house for €300k and in thirty years it is now worth €16 million. I would not even mind if the house value depreciates by one or two million, or even ten. What am I even going to do with that much money? If my net worth is six million, that is more than enough for me.
I think when the right say "becoming more conservative" as one grows older, it seems like a coded phrase to mean becoming greedy. And it seems to be the case that could happen to everyone regardless of whether one is left or right when they were younger. Which makes me realise that this is the point Squid Game is making.
i'm getting more conservative as i age, in that i want to go further and further back in time. At this point i'm somewhere around late mesopotamian era.
Adams is dumb enough to do it too, even though that's just going to make more people switch to Mamdani
Minimum wages?? Nah we need to pay them LESS -every CEO
Are Americans aware of what "minimal wage" means? I'm starting to have some doubts.
No we literally do not.
It is pretty much impossible to afford a studio apartment almost anywhere in the country with a full time, min wage job.
Our guidelines for what counts as poverty are a total joke.
I live off of about 24k a year while I am recovering from a bunch of injuries, and most states do not consider that poor enough to qualify for pretty much any assistance.
We also just gutted Section 8, so basically about 5 to 10 million people are gonna become homeless by the end of the year.
A lot of people don't believe jobs should make a living wage. They argue that if you want to make enough money to survive, you should get an education or work your way up out of entry level, while conveniently ignoring the fact that they've made education wildly expensive and that minimum wage is so outdated that in some places you can make double or triple minimum wage and still not be considered making enough to survive as a single adult with no dependents (I make over 3x minimum wage and rent on a small 1 bedroom apartment is over half my paycheck, if I don't work OT shifts I don't go grocery shopping that month). They also like to complain that no one wants to work anymore. My personal take is that if a job is worthwhile enough to society that someone needs to do it, that person deserves to make enough to survive, but apparently that's a wildly socialist take in this country.
There is a whole group of people that actually believe that some jobs should not provide a living wage. They will argue that high school students don’t need a living wage and then unironically still want McDonald’s to be open during a school day.
Guess they don't have what it takes to stay in business.
Maybe they could get better at it.
No no no!
We need food deserts and just barely not literally slave labor wages!
How else could Instacart generate profits for billionaires?
Think of the yachts that will never be laid down, you sick, sick bastards!
Fuck instacart. Pay your workers their value.
Also I just never use instacart. There's like 5 groceries I can walk to (in NYC). If I had to order, I'm pretty sure there are better options.
Instacart and such make their money off more people using their service. Which their service is something that shouldn't actually be affordable off most people's income.
If people actually consider how much time things take and the costs involved, and obviously the company is scraping money off to be profitable as well. So if you ask someone to pick up $30 worth of groceries because you were busy and you live 5 miles from the store. One should assume it is going to take someone 10 minutes to drive to your place from that store. So another 10 minutes to get to that store. It's going to take 10 minutes to find your items, 5 minutes to check out. Time to get to and from the parking lot and return the cart, maybe 2 minutes. Drop off times 1-15 minutes (because yes people order cough medicine, Advil, wine, etc and they will be required to wait for people to show up at their door and scan their ID, which many aren't ready, are down the street or don't know where their ID is or they live on the 3rd floor in a gated community. And if they aren't there, you have to wait 10 minutes before you can leave anyways to see if they show up. But for sake of conversation, we'll say 1 minute.
So we are looking at around 38 minutes +10 miles driving (which companies list at .70 cents a mile to cover gas and wear and tear now).
So if the driver were to be getting paid $20/hr, that's $19.67 you would need to be paying before Instacart takes out their share. Which a quick search says they take 5-10%. Of which number I'm not sure so let's say $3.
So with those numbers you should expect to pay $52.67 for $30 worth of groceries, and the driver will be paid under $20 an hour. Because they are not guaranteed to get another order when that order ends. They could not get another for an hour or more, but usually not. Otherwise they wouldn't be working that area.
So what really happens is you pay about $38.76. (just added $30 to a Kroger cart to check on instacart, $2 tip was automatic).
So that's $8.76 over the $30 in groceries.
If we take out what is required by the government (70 cents per mile) for businesses to pay for the use of a person's vehicle.
They make $2.78/hour on that drive.
So the drivers are hoping for people to tip high, and then to have vehicles that degrade at lower than what businesses are required to pay for vehicle degredation. And that they don't have to wait between trips. People working instacart are doing it because they cannot find a better job at that time. Sure maybe someone gives a $10 tip. But in that scenario that means they got paid an extra $8 on $2.76/hr.
Can people make more, sure. But that's the basis that instacart is built on. Of course they won't be profitable many places if they had to pay $20/hr and then give the tip to the driver.
The Business model is based off screwing desperate people to help people acquire a service they can't normally afford.
Those are some very tight time estimates. I suggest you take a stopwatch with you next time you shop for groceries.
Also, you're ignoring the markup Instacart adds to items (last I checked, 10-15%).
Also, mileage is currently 67¢/mile, not 0.7¢/mile.
Yeah the times I tried to keep minimal
There is no markup on items on stores like Kroger/Walmart the prices will all be the same as the shelf. If you buy from Publix they will be marked up. I assume because they know the customers are already willing to pay more.
Just for a heads up it was .67 cents in 2024, went up to .70 for 2025. Not sure if it's because cars kept going up or gas, I don't know how they calculate that.
Edit: I was running some on days off earlier this year to try to pay off some things. Kroger is one of the quickest stores in my experience, everything else goes up in time.

Thanks for the attempted update, but 0.7¢ - seven tenths of a cent - is still 1% of 70¢.
Last I checked, Instacart marked up all stores.
Maybe it does in your area. It's not hard to check though, price of item in Instacart app, matches price of item on Kroger app. Right now it's 2.99 for a gallon of milk on both at my local store.
If an item in store doesn't match the price it was in the app their app freaks out when you try to check out and denies the purchase. Stupid things happen all the time like that. Like if someone goes and puts a cheaper price on half the ground beef because they want to get it out of inventory, it doesn't match the price in app so you'll have to do a "replacement" of 80/20 ground beef for 80/20 ground beef which will notify the customer that they didn't have it and ask for approval if they didn't set their purchases to approve for replacements or what not. (I dont order off instacart, so I'm not familiar with that side as much, just the taking/picking up of the orders).
-
Pay people more.
-
Raise prices.
-
Remove the expectation of tipping.
If your business model doesn't support this strategy, it's a shit business model. I imagine most people who use Instacart already tip at least $10, so if that's what the cost increase will be, I see no issue here.
all 20 comments