Kathleen Griesbach, a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at Columbia University and lead author on the paper, says several Instacart features came up over and over again in interviews, which were conducted between October 2018 and February 2019 (an Instacart spokesperson says the company piloted a new algorithm this April—see update at bottom of article.) The platform awarded so-called “early access” benefits to workers who had logged 90 hours over the past three weeks or 25 hours over the last three weekends. Having met that requirement, the workers would be allowed to sign up first for certain in-demand hours. On the other hand, if they failed to meet the minimum, they’d have to wait to sign up until after the initial rush. “If you lose early access, you’re pretty well screwed with Instacart because that means you’ll only be able to pick up whatever is left over on Wednesday, which is absolutely nothing. So you won’t work,” one woman named Linda told the researchers.

Vanessa Bain, an Instacart worker and organizer in California, has worked for the company for several years; she tells New Food Economy that her wages slip when the platform changes its policies, seemingly out of the blue. Policies like early access increasingly require that employees be available for several hours out of the day, regardless of whether or not they’re paid for their time. Bain says she used to make a living working solely for Instacart, but she now performs delivery services for multiple platforms including Caviar and DoorDash.

Other workers surveyed feared being flagged for “reliability incidents,” which could result from rejecting too many orders and result in account deactivation. This effectively encouraged shoppers to accept low-paying jobs for which they might actually lose money in order to avoid being punished. One woman described passively declining a low-paying order 27 times during a shift. Not only did the support team refuse to help her, but she didn’t earn any money that day because she was only being offered a single opportunity, one that was more trouble than it was worth. Griesbach notes that the workers often only receive information about available orders one at a time, a feature she calls “information asymmetry” that serves Instacart. The company can nudge shoppers to accept low-paying jobs without knowing better-paying gigs are available in the area.