Instacart personal shopper, Sydney Hollingsworth, carries a customer’s order after purchasing it at the Bi-Rite Market on Divisadero Street on Thursday, July 24, 2014 in San Francisco, Calif. Photo By Lea Suzuki/The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images

It takes a special kind of asshole to promise a big cash tip to your grocery delivery worker, only to steal it at the last minute. We reported in 2020 that tip-baiting is a real problem for Instacart, and that the company has introduced a new policy where it claims to protect some of those tips.

The policy is straight from the company's press release.

Instacart’s first-of-its-kind tip protection offering will protect shoppers from customers who remove a tip without reporting an issue with the order. This protection will apply when a customer zeroes out their tip after delivery without reporting an order issue. Instacart will cover the amount of the zeroed-out tip, up to $10, to ensure shoppers are not adversely affected. While having a tip zeroed out after delivery is exceedingly rare, Instacart wants to ensure that shoppers are supported in the event that this happens.

It makes me wonder if Instacart isn't telling us about tip-baiting because if it is that simple, those assholes are going to drive a semi-truck through.

If a customer reports an issue with their delivery, Instacart doesn't have to pay tips. Do we think the kind of asshole who stiffs their delivery worker at the last minute isn't making up some bullshit excuse? That makes a huge difference to Instacart.

Is it possible to keep a group of people who hate Instacart from forcing the company to pay a whole lotta tips out of pocket by omitting a reason for tip-baiting? I would be very surprised if the company doesn't have ways to prevent that, ways that might make this offer less generous than it seems.

I asked Instacart about both of these possibilities, but I don't know for sure. Charlotte Healow sent me this.

If the customer reduces their tip to $0 without reporting any issues with their order, we’ll cover the cost of the tip that they removed (up to $10).

This applies to all orders with a tip removed entirely after delivery, without a reported order issue — it does not apply to orders where a tip was never included.

Some of the order issues that a customer may report include if their order never arrived, their items were spoiled or damaged, or they had items missing from their order.

We have several anti-fraud measures in place to ensure that customers may not falsely report order issues, request refunds, or remove tips without a valid reason. If customers are found to be engaging in fraudulent activity, they will be removed from the platform.

This includes any customer found to be consistently removing their tips after delivery without a valid reason, as we previously shared in June 2020.

In 2020, Instacart will give tip-baiters only 24 hours to bait, and will also promise to remove customers who engage in this type of behavior.

Please forgive my skepticism, but I think it's justified with companies like Instacart, which have been found to be stealing their workers' tips, and lobbying against them with promises that they immediately broke and are now going forward into a world.

While it's the leading grocery delivery company, it was recently forced to slash its valuation, and the WSJ profiles its current challenges in this story. Brad Stone wrote about how both it and its rivals are getting squeezed.

The response was added at 4:30PM.