I’ll start with the part that matters most: I’m not writing this as an outsider. I use Instacart. Not daily, not religiously, but often enough that I know exactly when something feels off. You place an order thinking you’re being reasonable, practical, efficient. And then the receipt lands and you pause. Not in shock. Not in outrage. Just in that familiar New York moment of “Wait… how did that get there?” You scroll. You scan. You shrug. And you move on. That shrug is the entire business model.

Instacart didn’t trick its way into our lives. It showed up when we were tired. When the city was stretched thin. When time felt more expensive than money. Groceries without the schlep sounded like freedom. No lines. No bags. No weather. No train delays. Just food appearing at your door like a small miracle. Of course it worked. Of course it scaled. Convenience always wins in New York. It always has.

What Instacart also did, very deliberately, was normalize paying more without feeling it. The markup isn’t loud. It’s not one big punch. It’s death by a thousand polite adjustments. Prices that are higher than in-store. Fees stacked just far enough apart that your brain stops adding them up. A service fee here. A delivery fee there. A heavy-item surcharge that somehow applies to half your cart. And the most powerful line of all: prices may be higher than in-store. That one sentence is doing more labor than half the gig workers on the platform.

This isn’t speculation. Consumer Reports compared Instacart prices to in-store prices and found markups commonly ranging from ten to thirty percent. Forbes has documented the same thing. Independent audits have repeated it. Anyone who shops both ways knows it instinctively. Instacart doesn’t hide this. It doesn’t have to. It relies on the fact that most people won’t stop using the app even when they know.

What makes Instacart especially effective is that it isn’t selling groceries. It’s selling relief. Relief from carrying. Relief from planning. Relief from friction. And it understands behavior better than most people understand themselves. The app nudges you toward replacements that cost more. It suggests add-ons at the exact moment your resistance is lowest. It reorganizes choices so your eye drifts upward instead of down. That’s not manipulation in a villain sense. That’s e-commerce design. Amazon does it. Uber does it. Every serious platform does it. Instacart just does it to food, which makes it more personal.

Then there are the shoppers. The human beings everyone pretends are being “empowered” by the gig economy. These people are running all over the city with three orders at once because batching increases platform efficiency. They pay for their own gas. Their own insurance. Their own wear and tear. And in a system that still allows post-delivery tip adjustments, they can finish an order thinking they made one amount and discover later that it vanished. That’s not empowerment. That’s volatility disguised as flexibility.

Here’s where I need to be very clear. This is not anti-business. This is not anti-profit. Instacart built a massive company by solving a real problem. That deserves respect. Innovation should make money. Builders should win. Risk should be rewarded. That’s how cities like New York grow. The issue isn’t that Instacart makes money. The issue is that its success quietly reshapes the food economy without anyone really agreeing to the terms.

Instacart changes how we understand grocery prices. It lifts the baseline. It makes higher costs feel inevitable. Wealthy customers barely notice. For them, it’s a convenience fee. For working families, seniors, people with disabilities, and anyone living close to the margin, it’s a silent drain. The people who benefit most from grocery delivery are often the people least able to absorb the markup. That’s not ideology. That’s math.

And when enough people stop going into stores, something else happens. Local groceries lose volume. Neighborhood rhythms change. Prices rise further to compensate. The platform doesn’t just respond to the market. It reshapes it. That doesn’t make Instacart evil. It makes it powerful. And power without transparency always deserves scrutiny.

I don’t want Instacart banned. I don’t want a boycott. I don’t want moral panic. I want awareness. I want people to understand that convenience isn’t free, even when it feels invisible. I want New Yorkers to remember that paying attention is still the most powerful consumer move we have. Compare prices. Pick up groceries when you can. Support stores that don’t hide margins behind interfaces. Use the app, but don’t sleepwalk through it.

Instacart didn’t break the system. It became the system because we let it. And systems don’t change because someone writes an angry tweet. They change when enough people stop shrugging.

This city is built on people who notice things. On people who ask why. On people who refuse to be quietly overcharged just because life is busy. We don’t need to reject convenience. We just need to stop letting it run the whole show.

By Marco Shalma