Instacart customers can be demanding.
Two months ago, an Instacart driver went viral after claiming that a customer requested that their milk be delivered at a temperature “40 degrees or below.” A month before that, in May, a Reddit post showing a very picky customer got shared around the internet. The customer in question made odd requests such as asking for grape tomatoes that would last for 3 to 4 weeks and eggs that would last for two months.
Now, another customer’s peculiar request has gone viral. In a Reddit post entitled “Insta-cancel,” Redditor u/Hannerlore shares a wild series of demands they received from a customer.
The request, which is over 230 words long, asks that the shopper, among other things, “select all items with far-out expiration dates,” “kindly shop perishable items last and place in insulated bags,” and “send full vertical photos of the best white orchids as well as the best deep purple orchids, so that I may select the best one.”
The customer also asks that the “same person shop and deliver, and deliver all items within 1/2 hour of shopping to prevent spoilage.”
According to u/Hannerlore, doing this would be near impossible, especially given that it was batched with other orders. This is why the Redditor reached out to Instacart support to request that the order be reassigned, hopefully not in a batched order.
In response to reading the customer’s messages, the Instacart support agent simply said, “Oh wow.”
“You know it’s bad when even the IC Support agent agrees with you,” the Redditor wrote in the caption of their post. “If she hadn’t been batched with two other orders I might have attempted it. In the end I lost out on a $5 tip, that one of the other guest ended up giving me in cash anyway.”
Commenters were quick to tell u/Hannerlore that they were right to cancel the order.
“The use of the word kindly is such a red flag,” said a user.
“Made the support rep go off the usual robot-like response script…that’s when you know a customer is a lil too crazy,” observed a second.
“If they are that particular why not just go shopping yourself?” asked a third.
The Daily Dot reached out to Instacart via email and u/Hannerlore via Reddit chat.
