Instacart’s Broken Flywheel

A two-sided marketplace turns out to be multi-sided, and that makes a big difference

In Instacart Hounds Workers to Take Jobs That Aren’t Worth It, Josh Eidelson looks deeply into what seem to be coercive practices at Instacart, intended to make workers take on low-paying grocery deliveries, since workers are generally not offered a way to decline deliveries. What happens is that workers simply ignore the delivery opportunity, which leads to a four minute barrage of pings. This is a specific instance of missing the middle…