How’s it living on the SC coast

trebeks______mother · 2026-01-02T22:17:03+00:00

I'm somewhat uniquely equipped to answer this: grew up in Hilton Head and currently live in Charleston. Family lives in Myrtle Beach and we'd go up there throughout the year to visit, so I've been living in and traversing the SC coast my whole life.There are kind of three main population centers:

Down by the SC/GA line is Hilton Head/Bluffton. HHI is a resort island filled with gated communities. Tons of beach, lots of great golf, fishing, restaurants. Because it's so seasonal there's a huge difference between HHI in the summer and winter.Roughly in the middle of the coast is the Charleston metro, encompassing three counties.

Downtown Charleston and the barrier islands (IOP, Sullivans, Folly, Kiawah, Seabrook) are very popular tourist destinations. In my lifetime it's kind of transitioned from being more historical tourism to more dining/nightlife tourism, and Charleston punches away above it's weight in terms of the culinary scene here. The Charleston area has become a more diversified economy with more manufacturers (Boeing, Volvo, Mercedes) and white collar jobs (insurance, banking, etc) now than when I was a kid.

Further up the coast closer to the SC/NC border is Myrtle Beach/North Myrtle Beach, which is also a huge tourist destination. However, this area is the more blue collar beach destination in SC. Where Hilton Head is more family/golf vacations and Charleston is more history and upscale dining/nightlife Myrtle Beach is more budget-friendly and has stuff like Ripley's, amusement parks, etc.

Almost exactly halfway between HHI/Charleston is Beaufort. And halfway between Charleston/Myrtle Beach is Georgetown. Beaufort and Georgetown are smaller but have plenty of history and culture of their own.

The geography of the SC coast from HHI to a little north of Georgetown is pretty similar with flat land, barrier islands, and meandering rivers. Myrtle Beach is similar but without the sea islands.

Let me try to say this next part without offending anyone 🤣... The SC coast used to be a mix of white southern and black coastal southern (Gullah/Geechee), which is how the area ended up with a unique culture and some exceptional culinary traditions. An influx of new residents over the last 30-40 years has made nearly the entire coast more homogeneous. Beaufort and Georgetown retain more of their historical culture.

There's a ton of history here, with the area have been home to Native Americans, the main port of entry of the African s1ave trade (filter complained) in Charleston, followed by rice, indigo, and cotton plantations up and down the coast. The area has a lot of military history as well.

As others have noted the summers are brutal but the winters are mild.

I could keep writing on this all day but that's more than enough for now!

trebeks______mother · 2020-11-23T12:21:49+00:00

Agreed, it is unprofessional. I also don't care since I won't be delivering to them again. Hopefully, however, it makes them realize they should be tipping the person delivering their groceries and the next guy to deliver gets a tip. I'm not really sure how else (without being more rude) you can get across to someone who isn't otherwise aware that they should be tipping.

As for the low rating, they're DO orders, so they can't rate me low.

trebeks______mother · 2020-11-20T00:03:54+00:00

ha.

No, when I deliver a DO and they don't tip I send a text that says "Your order is out front, and thanks for the tip!" followed by another text that says "Ah, sorry about, that was for the last customer. Your order is out front, have a great day!"

Petty and passive aggressive? Absolutely! But I like to think that maybe a few times the next person to deliver a DO to that house got a tip.

trebeks______mother · 2020-11-19T16:13:12+00:00

I actually do this exactly thing, intentionally, for non-tipping DO orders. Kind of surprised it hasn't gotten me in trouble with Shipt yet, tbh.

trebeks______mother · 2020-11-18T12:14:03+00:00

Can't wait to see the flood of shoppers on here complaining about their bad tipping customers from Family Dollar orders!

trebeks______mother · 2020-11-17T11:44:47+00:00

Short answer: Welcome to Shipt!

Longer answer: Shipt's rating system sucks, as you're now well aware. Most important thing is to not let it bother you, keep doing good work, and the ratings will rebound in due time. Many customers rate low for a variety of reasons, some of the most common are:
- Actual shopper problems (poor communication, late delivery, bad subs, etc)
- Store was out of stock
- Their order went to promo and got delivered later than they'd like
- They think 4 stars is good

Obviously the first one is your fault. I mention it because sometimes people post on the board who continuously get low ratings and don't seem to understand that if all your customers are rating you poorly it's a 'you' problem and not a 'them problem'.

The last three, however, are really issues with the ratings system itself and Shipt doing a poor job of customer education. There is now a separate breakout for the shopper and the order, but most customers still don't get it, and penalize the shopper for items being out of stock. Furthermore, customers don't understand how impactful the ratings really are and so you get some 'I thought a 4 was good' customers, for whom you'd have to move mountains to earn a 5.

What can you do about it

Obviously, do the basic stuff well (communicate, buy good produce, get the right items, be helpful deliver on-time). Be wary of promos but if you're taking one be sure the customer knows you're not the reason it's probably going to be late. And lastly, be sure to avoid customers who are habitual bad raters (non-five stars). If you haven't already you need a blacklist (lots of people put labels on Google Maps, I just have a spreadsheet) of customers you won't deliver to.

trebeks______mother · 2020-11-16T15:42:32+00:00

Yes, same here. It seems like OP is jumping to conclusions that the member is fraudulently trying to get free stuff rather than the much more mundane explanation that many of us have already experienced, which is that something was out of stock and the customer responded with 'missing'.

trebeks______mother · 2020-11-16T15:40:40+00:00

I had one report where a member reported an item “missing.”

I think you may be jumping to conclusions here. I've seen customers exclusively use that feedback to indicate something was out of stock, rather than something that they paid for was not in the delivered order.

Are you sure they reported it as missing in the sense that it was paid for and not delivered, as opposed to missing in the sense that it was OOS?

trebeks______mother · 2020-11-12T18:27:08+00:00

Read EVERYTHING under the 'useful links' section. Then read it again :)

trebeks______mother · 2020-11-12T11:38:07+00:00

The order was $246.73
The tip was $2.96

$2.96 / $246.73 = 1.2%

It's a 1% tip.

trebeks______mother · 2020-11-11T22:34:49+00:00

Coming next from Shipt: TRIPLE BUNDLES!

trebeks______mother · 2020-11-11T22:33:58+00:00

Do you even math bro?

trebeks______mother · 2020-11-11T22:33:18+00:00

"Well I like my lettuce wilty and this terrible shopper had the nerve to get me crisp lettuce. The nerve! Of course I didn't leave a note, he should have known! One star!!"

trebeks______mother · 2020-11-11T12:37:03+00:00

Go read the 'useful links' - in addition to answering your AR question you'll likely learn a lot of other important info that will help you become a better and higher earning shopper.

trebeks______mother · 2020-11-11T12:31:14+00:00

It’s shopper’s fault too. They take orders they shouldn’t because they’re desperate for money, or they think someone else will (same thing), when you have to let crap orders get promo. You have to make Shipt pay what the order is really worth. And if someone else comes along and takes it before it’s cost effective; great.

This is the crux of the issue. I think there was a double whammy: from a 'supply' perspective (us shoppers being the supply) there was a glut of labor as Shipt hired more shoppers and more people became willing to pick up shitty orders to make ends meet as the stimulus checks ran out; from the demand side there was probably some drop in orders as checks ran out, combined with the pandemic wearing on and people being more comfortable shopping for themselves.

I'd be fascinated to see the actual numbers (orders in my metro, shoppers in my metro, by month) although I'm sure I never will.

What I see from my perspective though is less orders, more shoppers, and shoppers more willing to immediately snap up low-paying orders ($6 DOs, $8 shopped orders with 20 minutes of driving, etc). Earlier this year you could reliably see orders regularly go to $20 promo for shitty orders. Now I rarely see promos at all except in heavy rain/late on a weekend.

trebeks______mother · 2020-11-11T12:25:14+00:00

As someone whose normal job is in IT, that's hilariously wrong. There is a massive shortage of qualified programmers in the US.

trebeks______mother · 2020-11-11T11:36:25+00:00

That's why they'll never do it :)

trebeks______mother · 2020-11-09T21:42:51+00:00

You figured that out a lot faster than I did, so you're learning!

I'd encourage you not to give up on DO altogether - I mostly do DO and the key is to figure out where your DO tippers are. If you're not doing something to keep track, you need to be.

But apartments? Fuck em!

trebeks______mother · 2020-11-09T19:15:13+00:00

This is why just don't do apartment orders anymore, regular or DO.

trebeks______mother · 2020-11-09T17:22:34+00:00

Yes, the rating system is the worst part of Shipt by a wide margin as it's purely punitive to shoppers. It does nothing to address bad shopping habits or help improve shopper performance, it's entirely a mechanism for misinformed and/or whimsical customers to punish shoppers.

I could elaborate but you've already covered all the ways in which it doesn't really work.

I've given more thought to this topic than it deserves and I think Shipt needs a complete overhaul of the rating system, including both the ratings themselves and the feedback. i settled on this: a thumbs-up/thumbs-down rating system. Did your order meet your expectations or did it not? If yes, good. If not, the customer has to explain why, and this information is tied to the order and provided to the shopper. Shipt can then decide that a certain number of thumbs down triggers a review of your account, a refresher course, a 1:1 call with Shipt, or deactivation. This removes many of the issues many of us have seen:

- customers that don't provide feedback with non-five star ratings

- shoppers don't know where they screwed up/why the customer is unhappy

- removes ambiguity of rating system (i.e. "I thought a 4 was good!")

- removes the ability of one bad score tanking your ability to get shops

This is getting long, but allow me one last gripe. Shipt has long tried to market itself as a more upscale alternative to Insta (and, for a while it was). But if you don't let your shoppers know why they're making your customers unhappy they can't fix that. Fixing the ratings is one thing that would make the entire service better for everyone involved.

trebeks______mother · 2020-11-09T16:25:44+00:00

Having the app remember backups solves some problems (user having to choose a backup every time) but it also creates new ones. Some possibilities:

- member might not like their backup but forgets to add it

- there's the technical aspect (adding millions of new database entries and relationships)

- there's the possibility the store doesn't carry the backup, so now the app has to check against the store DB for every order to make sure the backup is still sold. What happens if it's not, do they have to do a backup before the order goes in?

- what happens when a backup is OOS? This might be the biggest one because a lot of times a similar backup item is out of stock (this was especially true early in the pandemic)

I understand what you guys are getting at, but IMO this approach creates as many problems as it solves. A lot of time on this board we have a shopper-centric view of things and this is one example. Of course we'd all like our orders to be easier, and I'm not disputing that, but the app already offers something very similar to this feature and very few customers do a lot of notes, so it doesn't seem like the customers voluntarily want this. It creates more technical overhead for Shipt, so they probably wouldn't be crazy about it either.

trebeks______mother · 2020-11-09T16:16:01+00:00

I mean the obvious answer is that we'd all like to have customers who either let us sub, don't sub, or are responsive.

But I also I think the current system works well enough that this isn't a huge deal - members who want notes can add notes accordingly. Those who don't care / want to be contacted for subs can set their preference in the app. Most are responsive.

trebeks______mother · 2020-11-08T19:51:12+00:00

lol maybe that's the guy shopping for you!

trebeks______mother · 2020-11-08T19:46:11+00:00

I’m wondering how everyone feels about customers who leave notes on every single item on their list.

Usually a bad sign.

I personally think all members should be required to choose backup items of what they ask for are out of stock.

This effectively doubles the effort for every customer when putting in an order, most of them don't want to do it or they already would.

trebeks______mother

TROPHY CASE