When I began using Instacart about five years ago, grocery delivery struck me as an almost preposterous luxury. I hadn’t grown up in a household where paying someone else to do the grocery shopping was a particularly imaginable expense. I’ve only recently come around to purchasing frozen, pre-chopped onions without a small pang of guilt. But the pandemic had made grocery delivery feel sensible, even responsible, and I quickly developed an appreciation for the peculiar pleasure of having someone else navigate the supermarket on my behalf.
For a while, the service justified my enthusiasm. A missing shallot might become a red onion. All-purpose flour might arrive as bread flour. Once, a family-sized frozen lasagna was replaced with an enormous bag of frozen pasta and meatballs. None of these exchanges was perfect, but they followed a recognizable culinary logic. Someone, somewhere, appeared to understand what dinner was supposed to be.
Over the past couple of years, however, the substitutions became increasingly adventurous. Shoppers, often from profiles with traditionally male names, would inform me that a supermarket had apparently run out of tomatoes in every conceivable form. Fresh, canned, crushed, diced: all gone. Carrots became parsnips. Green cabbage became spinach. More than once, I found myself studying photographs of grocery shelves, circling the very products I’d requested and sending the images back to my shopper, who would politely assure me that they weren’t available.
Then came the order in which a request for Panko breadcrumbs was fulfilled with a box of vanilla wafers.
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The breadcrumbs were meant to become a crunchy, buttery topping for a baked pasta with Parmesan, peas and ham. Instead, my shopper sent me a photograph of vanilla wafers, without comment, and marked the breadcrumbs as unavailable. I had several modest counterproposals: Italian breadcrumbs, plain breadcrumbs, even a loaf of bread would do. But by the time I opened the app to make my case, my shopper had already checked out.
The vanilla wafers were on their way.
I was hardly alone in this experience. Across Reddit, TikTok and other corners of the internet, grocery delivery customers have taken to chronicling the peculiar challenges of having their groceries selected by men. I couldn’t entirely determine whether my own disappointing experiences had made me more attentive to these complaints or whether the memes had taught me to regard male shoppers with additional suspicion. Either way, the stories were remarkably familiar.
One Reddit user, who had been ordering groceries while caring for a partner with a concussion, described receiving three bags of parsley after three separate attempts to purchase cilantro. Another shopper had suggested replacing saffron with a canned drink. The commenter had spent considerable time walking delivery workers through specialty aisles and negotiating alternatives, an especially frustrating undertaking when dietary restrictions were involved.
“Someone needs to figure this out, provide training or something!” the commenter concluded.
Eventually, the complaints became sufficiently widespread that Instacart did what corporations increasingly do when confronted with an inconvenient internet phenomenon: It made the phenomenon into an advertisement.
In late July, the company launched “The Male Shopper Project,” a mock training camp starring comedian Hannah Berner and Antoni Porowski, the culinary expert from “Queer Eye.” Wearing drill-sergeant regalia, Porowski instructs a group of hapless male shopper actors in such supermarket fundamentals as distinguishing celery from leeks, checking expiration dates and identifying ripe bananas. The casting introduces its own familiar comic premise: the polished gay man enlisted to introduce his less domestically accomplished counterparts to the finer points of everyday living.
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The accompanying press release was considerably more cheerful about the whole affair. There were jokes about “bad apples” and “bananas” substitutions, followed by a ten-dollar coupon (limited to 5,000 redemptions) and a reassuring inventory of the company’s quality-control features. Customers could specify how ripe they wanted their avocados, leave detailed instructions and select acceptable substitutions in advance.
The company’s proposed solution to the difficulties of outsourcing grocery shopping seemed to involve becoming an increasingly attentive manager of one’s outsourced grocery shopping. But the campaign raises a question that isn’t easily settled by viral videos or produce puns: Are men genuinely worse at grocery shopping, or have they become the convenient faces of a much broader problem?
The available statistics are surprisingly swampy. According to Instacart’s 2025 economic impact report, 61% of surveyed shoppers identified as women. Uber’s 2024 environmental, social and governance report, meanwhile, found that women made up 18% of its U.S. drivers but 46% of its couriers. Those are different jobs, performed on different platforms, and neither figure tells us which workers are more likely to mistake parsley for cilantro. That would require comparative performance data.
Male shoppers, for their part, have been understandably irritated by the stereotype.
“As a male shopper I hate these posts,” one Reddit commenter wrote, explaining that he handled his family’s grocery shopping and knew his local stores intimately. “Bad shoppers are bad shoppers. Being male has nothing to do with it.”
Another man described an impressive record of completed orders, along with an ability to navigate cosmetics, feminine hygiene products and unfamiliar grocery aisles. He knew how to cook, understood substitutions and was perfectly capable of asking a store employee for help. Other delivery workers pointed out that the apps themselves sometimes recommend spectacularly inappropriate replacements, leaving shoppers to make sense of suggestions generated by software.
These are reasonable objections. A competent man shouldn’t be presumed incompetent because a stranger on the internet received three bags of parsley. And grocery shopping for other people is genuinely difficult. A customer may have exacting preferences, a store may rearrange its shelves and an apparently suitable replacement may turn out to contain an allergen.
Then there’s the unpleasant economic reality of gig work. Full-service Instacart shoppers are generally independent contractors, paid by the batch rather than a guaranteed hourly wage, with earnings varying according to the order, distance, demand and tips. The work involves driving, lifting, navigating stores and responding to customers, often without the protections and benefits associated with conventional employment.
Spending another 15 minutes searching for a particular brand of yogurt may represent good service, but it also consumes time that a worker could otherwise spend completing another order.
It’s entirely possible, then, for the customer who has paid a premium for convenience and the shopper trying to make a reasonable living to feel equally ill-served by the arrangement.
And for what it’s worth, Instacart has, in fact, tried teaching people how to grocery shop. In 2021, the company promoted Carrot Academy, a collection of optional online lessons covering customer communication, produce selection and choosing appropriate replacements. Shoppers had identified substitutions as an area where they particularly wanted guidance. By 2025, the company had expanded the program to more than forty optional lessons, including short videos and personalized recommendations.
There is something mildly amusing about the distance between this real educational apparatus and the fictional boot camp, where the central problem is apparently that grown men need help identifying vegetables.
But there’s also something revealing about recruiting people to perform a form of labor that society has never been especially consistent about expecting everyone to learn. Grocery shopping requires accumulated knowledge of ingredients, cooking, nutrition, family preferences and the mysterious geography of supermarkets. Women have historically been expected to acquire much of that knowledge, often without much recognition that they’re developing expertise at all. (There is a particular additional irony in the fact that grocery shopping, long treated as women’s unpaid responsibility, has become a marketable service.)
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The gender disparity isn’t entirely anecdotal. A 2019 Pew Research Center analysis found that among married or cohabiting parents living with children, 80% of mothers said they were their household’s primary grocery shopper, compared with just 20% of fathers. That doesn’t mean men are incapable of doing the shopping. It means that, in many households, they have had considerably less practice.
In the churches where I grew up, the Proverbs 31 woman got a great deal of airtime. She cooked, cleaned, cared for her family and appeared to have discovered several additional hours in the day in which to accomplish it all. Later, during my brief stint in seminary — I dropped out to head to a liberal arts college after a semester — women sometimes joked about pursuing their “MRS. degrees.” Others clarified that they weren’t just there for an MRS. degree. Matrimony, apparently, was something of an unofficial concentration.
I’d like to report that these ideas about women’s domestic responsibilities have since retired to the church basement, alongside the folding chairs and industrial coffee urns. Unfortunately, they’ve proven remarkably well-traveled. Recently, I overheard a man tell a joke about how he and his housemates needed a wife to cook and clean for them; someone suggested that perhaps what they needed was a maid.
“What’s the difference?” he replied.
“The Male Shopper Project” also brought to mind how, right before the pandemic, I was having coffee with a friend whose husband had taken their young child to the supermarket. The coffee was years ago now, and I couldn’t reproduce most of the messages verbatim. But I remember the questions, and the rhythm of her phone buzzing on the table.
Did they need salted or unsalted butter?
Buzz.
Which cereal did their child like?
Buzz.
Where was the aluminum foil? What aisle?
Buzz.
Then came the one message I remember word for word:
“Nevermind.”
My friend chuckled. Then the chuckle caught in her throat and turned into a quiet, hiccuping sob. He did this all the time, she explained. I sat with her while she talked. She had found that it was easier to do things herself than to ask him to do them and then field a steady stream of questions. But she was exhausted either way.
She left him about a year later.
Sociologist Allison Daminger has studied this invisible dimension of household work: the planning, anticipation, decision-making and monitoring that continue even when someone else is performing the physical task. In her research, women assumed a disproportionate share of this mental labor, particularly the responsibility for anticipating needs and keeping track of whether tasks had been completed.
It’s the difference between buying groceries and knowing what groceries need to be bought. Between following a list and understanding why the items are on it.
And it helps explain why the male Instacart shopper meme has proven so durable. The central frustration isn’t necessarily that a man can’t find the right box of pasta. It’s that a woman who has paid to delegate a household task may find herself unexpectedly responsible for supervising its completion. The shopper sends a photograph. She studies it. He proposes an alternative. She explains why it won’t work. The groceries eventually arrive, and dinner still requires a trip to the corner store.
There are meaningful differences, of course, between a stranger navigating an unfamiliar shopping list and a husband who should know what his own family eats. But women who have spent years managing other people’s domestic uncertainty recognize the sensation. They thought they were handing off a task. Instead, they’ve acquired another person to manage.
By the end of Instacart’s fictional boot camp, the male recruits have learned to identify ripe bananas, read expiration dates and make sensible substitutions. The joke is that men can, in fact, be taught to buy groceries. The less amusing implication is how many have been allowed to reach adulthood without anyone expecting them to know how.
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from Ashlie D. Stevens
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