There are situations where this makes sense.

I gift meals to people in other cities when they're in need (sick, childbirth, death in the family) and I'm not nearby to help.

I've had intense working situations where an extra hour of work was worth paying someone $30 to deliver my $100 of groceries.

We've frequently used DoorDash and other services for small business meetings where we wanted to provide lunch, or in some situations where we had to stay late (security incidents, etc) and wanted to provide the team with something better than pizza delivery.

However it's also scary to watch some people who will DoorDash whenever they feel like it without regard to the cost. I watched some eye-opening conversations among college students comparing how much they had spent on DoorDash in the past year, even though they were not in a financial demographic that should have been indulging in delivery.

I use Instacart every week. It's clearly valuable over shopping yourself for a lot of people and the shoppers are clearly making more than "half a dollar".

Maybe you don't have kids or that busy of a schedule?

I use DoorDash all the time. Here in urban San Diego, there are lots of restaurants with no nearby parking – so you either have to park blocks away in a residential neighborhood or have a companion who can grab the food while the driver circles the block. Or carry your tacos home on the bus.

Wife and I work full time + kids. We'd rather spend time with our kids than shop 2-3 hours a week.

Have you considered that it’s convenient?

Infant+Costco+Instacart is a game changer. There is a life before and after this.

> I really don’t understand people who use these?

> are people so antisocial now that going and grabbing groceries yourself is too much to handle?

> Paying an immigrant worker half a dollar to drive some tacos to a member of the upper class when the math has never worked out in the immigrant’s favor seems… bad? Or atleast a good way to turbocharge inequality

Ok, but then...

> I use Amazon fresh frequently

So... you do seem to understand who uses these (it's exactly people like you), and you have an actual use case for using a grocery delivery service (since you use it yourself), but you just think that Amazon Fresh is a completely different experience and ecosystem than Instacart, that does not promote inequality, and isn't antisocial? Can you elaborate on your reasoning/sources? I wouldn't say Amazon is exactly known for its humane treatment of low-wage workers...

Having a terrible experience seems like a local issue, certainly some areas might have a worse pool of delivery personnel than others but where I live the people doing Instacart are primarily women and they do an excellent job. Many women can't do Uber because of the insane levels of harassment, but they are able to do "gig" work like Instacart or UberEats that doesn't involve interacting with random strangers.

Like most things in life, it's not a matter of difficulty, as if I am so incapable of going to a grocery store to buy groceries and the undue hardship it will cause me. It's simply a matter of how I like to budget my time. I judge that the 30 minutes it can take to do groceries is better spent doing other things with my life.

I mean right away you're assuming everyone has a car, if you don't have one then a service like this can save you a lot of time getting groceries.

There's also times when you have people over and don't want to leave to pick something up.

And times when you are too tired or sick and don't want to leave the house

disabled people who can't have a drivers license would like to have a word with you

Not a busy mom, I take it

Americans are busier than they've ever been.