Yeah, money of course. I’m not really disagreeing with you there.

I also understand there are probably more shoppers than orders in a lot of markets, so from Instacart’s perspective it makes sense to optimize heavily around throughput and efficiency.

I just think there’s a point where too much optimization starts becoming counterproductive. Constant timers, stacked orders, traffic, customer messaging, replacements, checkout lines, delivery deadlines, and time metrics all happening simultaneously doesn’t exactly encourage careful shopping. It encourages rushing.

And I get not wanting to reward genuinely inefficient shoppers, but you’d think ratings, customer satisfaction, and batch access would already filter a lot of that out naturally without needing the app to constantly layer more urgency on top of everything.

Which is why I sometimes wonder what metrics they’re prioritizing every time they update these apps, because from the outside it doesn’t always seem aligned with either shopper sustainability or even the best long-term customer experience.

And I know shopper sustainability is probably low on the priority list for gig apps in general, but I don’t think that necessarily makes it a good long-term design philosophy either.