Instacart reaches into your pocket and lops a third off your dollars

My background is very poor. Food stamps, raised by single mom, whole nine yards. For most of my 20s I existed in the very same cycle of bad financial decisions that many other poor people engage in.

My situation had approximately a 0% chance of changing until the behavior changed. That doesn't mean behavioral changes are always enough, but they are the absolute bare minimum and an excellent starting point.

People I still know in bad situations refuse to acknowledge this and refuse to critically examine their decisions. They do nothing but avoid, avoid, avoid and hope for a miraculous windfall.

Instacart is a SNAP/EBT vendor, so clearly they have low income customers. Some people prefer online shopping because of the stigma of using benefits in-person. For others without reliable access to transportation, delivery might be the most reasonable option. Public transit also takes time that might be better spent with family, or at your job.

Personal time is a highly constrained resource: finite, non-renewable, non-storable and mutually exclusive. You can’t simply value someone’s personal time based upon their paid time. (Though people love to do this anyways…as if a poor person’s life time is objectively worth less than a richer person’s.)

Poor people often have less time available, less supply, than others due to longer transportation times as well as having more chores that they must complete by themselves.

For example, a person can be making $15 / hour and only have 4 hours of available waking personal time per day. If during those 4 hours they must complete all personal and household chores, as well as find some time for recuperating, then they would likely value those 4 hours as much more than $15 each.

Or considered another way: the value of the first hour in a day is not worth the same as the last hour. That last hour is valued according to the tasks that must be accomplished during that time and what is lost if the tasks are not successfully accomplished. And when under stress, the value can change drastically.

In the city I grew up in they had no busses until a local company paid for the first one simply to get the poorer employees to work reliably because it was impacting production.

There are still many places in America where you either walk or you own a car, period. When the car breaks down and you need parts.. you walk. Worse there are no sidewalks. When the snow is a foot deep you risk frostbite and hypothermia.