My 61st Instacart paycheck 💸 🛒

This week was rather exciting. I had a few slow days, but two really good days in a row. One of which had one of my most interesting orders. Let's talk about it all.

Monday, March 18th

Tuesday, March 19th

No work

Wednesday, March 20th

Wednesday was dead for almost the entire day. I ate dinner early since I wasn't busy and then decided to keep the Instacart app online a few hours later than usual. I'm very glad I decided to do that.

I made about $92.23/hr on this day.

I had one double batch that had two of my regular customers. Both live within a mile of the store. The one usually only wants a couple of whole chickens for his pitbulls, which by the way are very friendly and always greet me at his gate. The other is my second-best customer in the whole city. This guy tipped me $76 for less than an hour of work.

I normally don't like to work after dark, but I was more than happy to this time because it turned a $0 day into an $83 day. Now let's see if the rest of the week offers much in terms of work.

Thursday, March 21st

Thursday morning I was too busy to turn the app online. I had a dentist appointment at 10, which didn't finish until 11. I knew that I wouldn't have time to work before that, so I went to the gym instead. It wasn't until close to noon that I was finally able to go online.

I made about $45.04/hr on this day.

I had a couple of mid-tier orders later in the afternoon, but other than that there was nothing doing. I've had some good Thursday earnings recently, but I never expected them. Friday is usually the most consistently good day for me. Let's see if that is the case this week.

Friday, March 22nd

Friday finally offered me a bit in terms of work. I had a busy morning with four of my regular customers. The double order was an easy one because both were for businesses that I'm familiar with. One was a bakery on the same street as where I live. The other was a Starbucks that only ordered a bunch of heavy cream. It was super easy to keep the two orders separate because of this and neither one was very far from the store.

I made about $71.71/hr on this day.

I had several hours of no orders, but then my most consistent customer popped up for his usual stuff. I think he makes tacos every weekend or something because I am always buying him ingredients for that. The day ended well since the last stop was just down the street from my home.

Saturday, March 23rd

Saturday sure was a doozy of a day. I had a decent amount of good orders throughout the day. It wasn't busy nonstop, but it was here and there. The first three orders a day went perfectly normal, they were all the customers I had delivered to before. My fourth order of the day though, the one at 5:42 PM for $58.20 was a bit different, to say the least.

I made about $67.12/hr on this day.

Upon accepting the $58 order, I knew that it was going to be weird. It had a red flame next to it. Meaning that Instacart had boosted the order since no shoppers had accepted it for an extended period of time. That's uncommon for order that pays this much. As soon as I saw the item list before accepting it, I understood why. This customer ordered 40 24-packs of water. Not only that but several cases of other types of flavored water. In my mind, I honestly assumed that the customer meant to order four cases instead of 40. I have never seen someone order this much from a grocery delivery service ever in my life.

Red the text conversation below to see that I was wrong and that the customer indeed expected me to deliver this insane amount to them.

I never responded after the last message because I started another order. It was starting to seem like a scam to me, but I'm pretty sure this dude was just so entitled that he thought someone was going to work like a slave for him so he didn't have to go to the store and carry 40+ cases of water. He had a Porsche and Audi parked outside of his average home, so I will never forget the house and will avoid accepting orders from him in the future.

I figured that he would remove the tip, but he only had two hours to do so, and I guess didn't do it in time because I was able to keep my full pay. Turns out that me taking a big risk, excepting such an outrageous order turned out to be an advantage to me. I wouldn't expect this to happen often, but I'll take it as it may the end of this day. Quite great.

By the way, $38 as a tip for an order this gigantic is terrible. He's insane if he thinks that his tip was HUGE as he called it. I've had dozens of customers tip me more than that for 1% of the work he was asking me to do. Some people are unreal. Get this customer off Instacart ASAP!

Sunday, March 24th

This was one of the slowest Sundays I've had in a long time. I had only one order all day long. I was just about ready to turn the app offline when I accepted this solo order.

I made about $46.23/hr on this day.

This was yet another regular customer of mine. Shoutout to them for giving me a half hour of work on Sunday to close out the week.

End of week hours and pay 🤑

My weekly pay was $426 and I barely worked just under 6.5 hours.

I made about $66.81/hr on average this past week.

Doing it again next week 👀

I can't say that I'm upset with how the week went. It wasn't my best week ever, but I got well above my weekly earnings goal. I know I'm happy any time that happens these days.

I hope you have enjoyed this insider look at what kind of pay is possible while working for Instacart.

^{Follow my curation trail}