When I started using Instacart about five years ago, grocery delivery struck me as an almost absurd luxury. I grew up in a household where paying someone to go grocery shopping wasn’t a particularly conceivable expense. I just recently started buying frozen, pre-chopped onions without a hint of guilt. But the pandemic has made grocery delivery smart, even responsible, and I quickly learned the special joy of having someone else do my grocery shopping on my behalf.
For a while, this service justified my passion. Lost green onions may turn into red onions. All-purpose flour may come in the form of bread flour. At one point, family-size frozen lasagna was replaced by a giant bag of frozen pasta and meatballs. None of these exchanges are perfect, but they follow accepted culinary logic. Someone somewhere seems to understand what dinner should be.
Over the past few years, however, replacement has become increasingly risky. Shoppers (usually those with traditionally masculine names) will tell me that a supermarket apparently already sells tomatoes in various forms. Fresh, canned, crushed, diced: all gone. Carrots become parsnips. Green cabbage becomes spinach. More than once, I studied photos of grocery shelves, circled the products I wanted, and then sent the image to my shopper, who would politely assure me that the products were out of stock.
Then came the order, in which a request for Panko crumbs was fulfilled with a box of vanilla wafers.
The purpose of the breadcrumbs is to be a crunchy and creamy topping for baked pasta with parmesan cheese, peas and prosciutto. Instead, my shopper sent me a photo of a vanilla wafer with no comment and marked the crumbs as unavailable. I have a few mild counter-suggestions: Italian bread crumbs, regular bread crumbs, or even a loaf of bread will work. But when I opened the app to prove my case, my shopper had already checked out.
Vanilla pancakes are on the way.
I’m not the only one who has had this experience. On Reddit, TikTok and other corners of the web, grocery delivery customers have begun documenting the unique challenges of having men pick out groceries. I’m not entirely sure if it’s my own disappointing experience that makes me pay more attention to these complaints, or if these memes teach me to be more suspicious of male shoppers. Either way, these stories are all too familiar.
One Reddit user, who had been ordering groceries while caring for his concussed partner, described receiving three bags of parsley after three attempts to buy it. Another shopper suggested substituting canned drinks for the saffron. This reviewer spent a considerable amount of time walking the delivery person through professional aisles and negotiating alternatives, an especially frustrating task when dietary restrictions are involved.
“Someone needs to fix this problem, provide training or something!” the commenter concluded.
Eventually, the complaints became so widespread that Instacart did what more and more companies are doing when faced with inconvenient online phenomena: turned the phenomenon into advertising.
In late July, the company launched its “Male Shopper Program,” a mock training camp starring comedian Hannah Berner and “The Rescuers” cooking expert Antoni Porowski. Dressed in a drill sergeant’s uniform, Porowski instructs a group of hapless male shopping actors on such supermarket basics as distinguishing celery from leeks, checking expiration dates and identifying ripe bananas. The casting introduced his familiar comedic premise: the elegant gay man enlists to introduce the minutiae of daily life to his less accomplished counterparts at home.
The accompanying press release paints a much more optimistic picture of the entire incident. There were jokes about “bad apples” and “banana” alternatives, followed by a $10 coupon (limited to 5,000 redemptions) and a reassuring list of the company’s quality control features. Customers can specify how ripe they want their avocados to be, leave detailed instructions and select acceptable substitutions in advance.
The company’s proposed solution to the difficulties of outsourced grocery shopping appears to involve becoming an increasingly attentive manager of outsourced grocery shopping. But the campaign raises a question that can’t be easily solved through viral videos or puns: Are men really bad at grocery shopping, or have they become a convenient face for a wider problem?
The available statistics are surprisingly confusing. According to Instacart’s 2025 Economic Impact Report, 61% of shoppers surveyed were women. Meanwhile, Uber’s 2024 Environmental, Social and Governance Report found that women make up 18% of its U.S. drivers but 46% of its couriers. These are different jobs, performed on different platforms, and neither data tells us which workers are more likely to mistake parsley for cilantro. This requires comparing performance data.
Male shoppers, for their part, are understandably annoyed by this stereotype.
“As a male shopper, I hate these posts,” one Reddit commenter wrote, explaining that he does his family’s grocery shopping and knows the local stores well. “A bad shopper is a bad shopper. Men have nothing to do with that.”
Another man described an impressive record of fulfilling orders and the ability to navigate cosmetics, feminine hygiene products and unfamiliar grocery store aisles. He knows how to cook, understands substitutions, and is perfectly capable of asking store employees for help. Other delivery people noted that the apps themselves sometimes recommended highly inappropriate alternatives, leaving shoppers unable to understand the recommendations generated by the software.
These are legitimate objections. A competent person should not be considered incompetent just because a stranger on the Internet received three bags of parsley. For others, grocery shopping is really difficult. Customers may have strict preferences, stores may rearrange shelves, and seemingly suitable alternatives may contain allergens.
Then there are the uncomfortable economic realities of gig work. Full-service Instacart shoppers are typically independent contractors and are paid on a per-lot basis rather than a guaranteed hourly wage, with earnings varying based on order, distance, demand and tips. The job involves driving, lifting, navigating a store, and responding to customers, often without the protections and benefits associated with traditional employment.
Spending another 15 minutes looking for a specific brand of yogurt may represent good service, but it also consumes employee time that could be used to fulfill another order.
It’s entirely possible, then, for customers who pay a premium for convenience and shoppers who are trying to live a reasonable life to feel equally unfairly served by this arrangement.
In fact, Instacart is already trying to teach people how to grocery shop, and it’s worth it. In 2021, the company promoted Carrot Academy, a series of optional online courses covering customer communication, product selection and choosing the right alternatives. Shoppers identified alternatives as an area where they particularly needed guidance. By 2025, the company has expanded the program to more than forty optional courses, including short videos and personalized recommendations.
There’s something interesting about the distance between this real-life educational institution and the fictional boot camp, where the central issue is apparently that grown men need help identifying vegetables.
But there are also implications for recruiting people into some form of labor, and society has never been particularly consistent in expecting everyone to learn. Grocery shopping requires accumulating knowledge about ingredients, cooking, nutrition, family preferences, and the arcane geography of the supermarket. Women have historically been expected to acquire most of this knowledge, often without realizing they were developing expertise at all. (It’s particularly ironic that grocery shopping, long viewed as a woman’s unpaid responsibility, is now a marketable service.)
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Gender differences are not entirely anecdotal. A 2019 Pew Research Center analysis found that among married or cohabiting parents who live with their children, 80% of mothers report being the family’s primary grocery shopper, compared with only 20% of fathers. This does not mean that men are incapable of shopping. This means that, in many families, they have far less practice.
In the church where I grew up, the women of Proverbs 31 got a lot of press. She cooks, cleans, takes care of her family, and seems to have a few extra hours a day to do it all. Later, during a brief period in seminary—I dropped out after a semester to go to a liberal arts college—women would sometimes joke about pursuing their “ladies’ degrees.” Others clarified that they were not just here to gain Madame’s approval. degree. Apparently, marriage was an unofficial concern.
I would like to report that these ideas about women’s domestic responsibilities have been relegated to church basements, alongside folding chairs and industrial coffee pots. Unfortunately, it turns out they were well traveled. Recently, I overheard a man tell a joke about how he and his roommates needed a wife to cook and clean for them; someone suggested that maybe they needed a maid.
“What’s the difference?” he replied.
The Male Shopper Project also reminds me that just before the pandemic, I was having coffee with a friend whose husband took their young children to the supermarket. The coffee was a few years ago and I can’t reproduce most of the information verbatim. But I remember the questions, and the rhythm of her phone buzzing on her desk.
Do they need salted butter or unsalted butter?
Buzz.
What kind of cereal do their kids like?
Buzz.
Where is the aluminum foil? What aisle?
Buzz.
Then came a message I don’t remember a word of:
“It doesn’t matter.”
My friend laughed. Then the giggle caught in his throat and turned into a small, hiccupping sob. She explains that he does this all the time. I sat next to her while she spoke. She found it easier to do things herself than to let him do them and then answer a steady stream of questions. But no matter what, she was exhausted.
She left him about a year later.
Sociologist Allison Daminger examines this invisible dimension of housework: the planning, anticipation, decision-making, and monitoring that continue even while others are performing physical tasks. In her study, women shouldered a disproportionate share of the mental work, specifically the responsibility for anticipating needs and tracking whether tasks were completed.
This is the difference between buying groceries and knowing which groceries you need to buy. Between following the list and understanding the reasons for the items on the list.
It also helps explain why male Instacart shopping memes are so enduring. The most frustrating thing isn’t necessarily when one can’t find the right pasta box. A woman who is paid to delegate household chores may unexpectedly find herself responsible for overseeing their completion. Shoppers send photos. She studies it. He proposed an alternative. She explains why it doesn’t work. The groceries eventually arrived and dinner still required a trip to the corner store.
There is, of course, a meaningful difference between a stranger browsing an unfamiliar shopping list and a husband who is expected to know what his family is eating. But women who have spent years dealing with the uncertainty of other people’s families recognize this feeling. They thought they were delivering. Instead, they hired another person to manage it.
By the end of Instacart’s fictional boot camp, male recruits have learned to identify ripe bananas, read expiration dates and make reasonable substitutions. The joke is, men can actually be taught to buy groceries. The less interesting implication is how many people are allowed to grow up without anyone expecting them to know how to be adults.
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From Ashley D. Stevens