Instacart is a gig-economy delivery service. Anybody can sign up to work for Instacart. They get orders parceled to them, do the shopping, and deliver the order to the customer. It's pretty much just grocery stores.

Steph has had a couple of orders delivered to me and that went fine. I placed my own order yesterday and kind of neat how many updates you get via the app. If they don't find an item you can select a replacement real time. You can also text chat with the shopper, they can send you pictures, etc. And then you get updates of delivery time.

They only had two of the four items at Costco. She did leave the receipt with me so we can calculate Instacart's markup.

Tilapia fillets, $13.45 == 16.39
Chicken tenders, $15.99 == $26.89

The second one was a replacement item which I said ok. But I didn't go through Instacart replacement system so they still charged me for original item which is much more expensive. So it looks like a 22% markup based on the first item.

There was also a $9 delivery fee, 15% tip of $6.50 (you can set tip percentage at the start of the order, default is 5%), and service fee of $2.15.

The total was $60.92 for an order that cost $13.45 + $15.99 = $29.44. I ended up paying over twice as much for a small order.

Hmm, so maybe not that great for small orders. And yet I don't want to make someone buy multiple bags of groceries. I don't know how I feel about using this service again.