I used to eat pretty much exclusively a mix of fast-food, restaurants, and the occasional frozen meal. Now I'm 100% delivery until there's a reliable vaccine, and I have been since February.

I'm also brand new to cooking and baking, and never really "shopped" at a grocery store in any meaningful sense, so all the things I'm buying from instacart are first-time purchases. I've never made a grocery shopping list. This is all new to me.

I'm having an exact mix of both of your experiences.

I just expect that about 10% of the order will be wrong somehow. I'm sure it's very annoying if you're shopping on a budget, but given that I'm learning to cook and bake and make use of whatever is around, precision isn't super important to me for most items.

I'm also using instacart as my shopping list, which is great, but it's a shopping list tied to one specific store, which is less great.

Here's some free advice for instacart's product team:

* Let me set all items in my order to "no substitutions" and toggle it on for items I absolutely can't be without. Or toggle "all substitutions" and don't nag me to approve each one as they happen. This is the most annoying part of interacting with the app. Just add a "mark all as no substitution" button in your next build, please, I know you can do it quickly.

* Help me shop better. Your "Explore" interface is laughably bad. Cart management is hard. I don't have a solution for you here, other than do it better. Browsing large stores on a mobile device is hard, but this is what you should be working to solve. Improve the UI of shopping as a whole. Spend some innovation tokens here. What you should be trying to do is help me map the universe of products in a way that lets me express my preferences, so you already know which items I consider acceptable substitutes. With enough people doing that, you have seriously valuable ML data. Once you know what I want to buy and what realistic substitution preferences are, you should be shopping for me across every store in my area to find the best overall deal for my cart that fits my requirements.

* Why is the shopper texting me at all? Using the service makes me feel like I'm tethered to my phone or I'm a bad person. If I don't stay connected, your shopper is going to be stressed about my order, and I'm going to end up getting the wrong thing. Your goal should be to remove anxiety from using your service, not increase it by keeping me tethered to my device while I'm visualizing someone else plucking items off the shelves. I've had 1 shopper that didn't text me at all and we communicated entirely through the "approve/deny" substitution buttons, which was still annoying, but less bad than the messages I get from other shoppers.

* WTF is with your fee structure? The app tells me the prices are higher than in-store AND there's a service fee AND there's a tip. This shouldn't be so complicated. I want to see "cost of items in store - cost of items on instacart", "amount paid to shopper", and "amount paid to instacart". The item cost can be savings or marked up due to increase demand or heavy weight or whatever, just be honest about the actual difference between going to the store and ordering on instacart. I know instacart should be paid, just show how many dollars go to paying instacart. I know the shopper is getting paid something already, show me how much, so I can tip accordingly, and you'll probably see a dramatic increase in tips.

Instacart is one of the more broken products that I use because it still delivers value. I get that they'll survive without fixing any of the stuff above, but it's a shame to see the opportunity wasted to build something really great.