Instacart went on a hiring spree. These workers got squeezed

After Kenneth Bloom retired from a career in the grocery business, he didn't stray far. The 61-year-old focused on delivering groceries for Instacart, a role he'd been doing as a side-gig before retirement. The work gave him more flexibility, a source of income to supplement his pension, and the chance to continue indulging in his fondness for food shopping.

As the pandemic first hit the US, Bloom, who has now worked with Instacart for more than two years, was in the enviable position of seeing more opportunities to make money. But that didn't last long. Several weeks into the health crisis, he started noticing that bigger ticket collections of orders, also known as batches, would get swooped up in the blink of an eye by one of the many other workers in Instacart's rapidly growing fleet of shoppers.