Clean up on aisle five! A gender-based debate has erupted in the grocery store.
On TikTok, people have been sharing their unsatisfactory experiences with male Instacart or DoorDash shoppers.
Samantha Riccardi, an aesthetician and TikToker with more than 515,000 followers, recently posted about one of these infamous experiences — and the video went viral.
“I am so mad. If you are not the CEO of DoorDash or Instacart, keep scrolling. This is not for you,” Riccardi says in her Jan. 5 video. “I am begging you to make an update on your app where I can request a female shopper.”
Riccardi explains that she just received a DoorDash order for five items and only one of them was correct. Her male shopper substituted her requested items for bafflingly close-but-not-quite-right ones, like garlic butter for butter spread, which she already had in her fridge.
“I’m gonna need that update to where I can request a female because this is f—ing annoying,” Riccardi continues, adding that she reluctantly complained since her order was 80% wrong. “So I got a full refund. F— you, ‘Ronald Top Shopper’ my ass.”
“I figured, what could go wrong?” Riccardi tells TODAY.com about placing what she says was her second grocery order ever. “I was incorrect, apparently.”
Her video garnered over 3 million views and thousands of comments, and Riccardi says she has a theory about why this video resonated so much with people.
“I could say, whether they’re my friend or not, that straight men do not pay attention to detail,” she says.
“I would say that they are shopping how they would shop for themselves, to be honest,” she continues. “We know that it’s a huge difference. But to them, they’re probably just making ground beef and rice five times a week, so who cares?
“POV: you got a straight male instashopper,” reads the caption of a Jan. 13 TikTok by Chris Burns, where he suggests very far-off substitutions to comedic effect, which garnered nearly 2 million views.
“From now on when I order Instacart, if I see the shopper is a boy, I’m immediately cancelling the order,” Jamila Bell says in a TikTok from back in March 2022, with over 900,000 views. “It’s like my little brother is shopping, you know what I’m saying? Just didn’t even think!”
The comments on these types of TikToks indicate that this experience is common:
- “Had a male shopper tell me the store was completely out of tampons.”
- “I ordered tampons he gave me q-tips like what that gonna do 😭”
- “A man substituted my ground beef for a watermelon and I’m still confused about it.”
- “Had a male shopper tell me they were out of eyebrow pencil because he was looking in the school supplies.”
- “I needed chafing cream and the dude said there was no such thing. Sir, I ordered it so obvi there is. Go ask someone!!!”
- “My favorite is when they send you a picture saying that your item is out of stock is there something else you want, and your item is front and center.”
- “I ordered tampons & was substituted white mushrooms. I have been telling this story for like 4 years because I am still not over it.”
- “one time i asked for 1 pound of green beans and i deadass got a single green bean.”
- “I once ordered 6 bananas, and even after specifically saying ‘individual bananas’ I received 6 BUNCHES of bananas. It was like 40+ bananas.”
- “Mine couldn’t find the blueberries, but that’s okay because he substituted them with strawberries. Then he couldn’t find grapes, but that’s okay, because he substituted them with blueberries.”
- “My last lady shopper messaged me concerned that the grapes didn’t look good and she didn’t want me to have bad ones. Meanwhile the dude brought me expired lunch meat.”
- “This guy marked 80% of my order out of stock even with the replacement options.”
- “I ordered 1 celery…he literally broke 1 stalk off the bunch bagged it and that’s what I got.”
Instacart did not respond to a request for comment from TODAY.com.
A DoorDash representitive says, however, that grocery order experiences like the one Riccardi had are extremely rare.
“In nearly all instances, customers receive what they order — less than 1% of grocery orders are reported with missing, incorrect, or defective items,” the rep tells TODAY.com. “We’re always working to improve so that every customer gets exactly what they ordered, every single time, and we value feedback to help us enhance the experience.”
DoorDash also reached out to Riccardi to offer her credits and redeliver the items she ordered.
Instacart mandates that all its shoppers complete an online training program, which covers use of the app and how to shop for customers, before they can start. Some folks online say it doesn’t seem to be enough.
But there are some male grocery shoppers trying to fight against this stereotype.
