Instacart Shopper Accepts $150 Order, Turns Out to Be More Than She Bargained For

To put it bluntly, working for Instacart can really, really suck. From customers trying to bait and switch you with tips to getting paid a pittance to collect and deliver large orders, to constantly having to worry about whether or not you're making good enough time and if you'll be able to find all of the items that your customer requested from the store, it can be a nerve-wracking experience.

However, there's a reason why some 600,000 independent contractors choose to work for Instacart: the ability to more or less make your own hours and pick up gigs whenever you want as either a side hustle or a full-time gig, without having to worry about following a set schedule or taking off when you feel like it, is a big plus for many.

Then there are times when customers don't officially pick-up their orders, which means in many cases, the delivery driver will take the food that wasn't accepted by the customer for themselves, which could be a far greater value than the amount of cash they would've received for completing the order.

And one Instacart employee posted a viral TikTok that demonstrates sometimes, Instacart drivers are able to secure a fat payout for a single delivery. In this case, however, she had her work cut out for her.

Jackie, who drives for Instacart and uploads content to TikTok under the username @creatingpurplejoy records herself in the midst of completing the order. The clip begins with her looking into the camera as a text overlay on the screen reads: "When you see a $150 Instacart order so you quickly accept it without really looking at the items you are about to be shopping for..."

If she did see all of the stuff she was expected to gather for this order, she may've hesitated to accept it, because it's clearly delineated in the rest of the video, Jackie purchased and ended up packing her vehicle with enough product to supply a small convenience store.

She had several carts filled with boxes of various pre-packaged snacks, like potato chips, cheese crackers, fruit snacks, granola bars, popcorn, and cereal, along with cases of soda cans in a caravan of carts she guided through the checkout aisle.

A closing shot of the video shows Jackie smiling into the camera as she sits in her car, surrounded by tons of items. It looks like there's only enough room for her and the boxes in her car.

You're probably wondering: "Sure, she made $150 to get all that, but how long did it take her?" According to Jackie, she earned a little more than $75 per hour for the job.

She writes in a text overlay for the clip: "So I got it done in less than two hours but - I wasn't expecting it to be thissss big! My car was packed, yall- I didn't think I was gonna make it all fit. Huge shoutout to my customer who had multiple employees with carts to help me unload and deliver!"

One commenter who saw the video said that they never place an order on Instacart that's less than $150 and that they always leave a 20% tip.

Jackie clarified that the entirety of the customer's order was $880, and she was given $150 to deliver it all to the store.

One Instacart driver said that they intentionally hang around "wealthier" areas in order to deliver people's groceries to them and she almost always gets "between 50-100 In tips and the actual highest tip I got was $200"