Instacart driver snags ‘juicy’ $124 batch over friend with Diamond status — then a $450 watch ruins the payout

Instacart shopper Dylan, who posts as papiidylan on TikTok, showed viewers a screenshot of what he called “the juiciest order I have ever seen on Instacart”: 27 items, 9.3 miles and a $124.03 payout. According to Dylan, the same order appeared for a friend with Diamond status and stronger stats, but even though they both accepted it, Instacart gave the batch to Dylan.

Dylan, a self-described Platinum-tier shopper, said he accepted the batch almost instantly because of the payout rather than what was in the cart. I’m taking it,” he said, adding that he mostly does Costco runs and rarely checks an order before agreeing to it.

That habit mattered this time. Buried in the list was a roughly $450 watch, which Dylan says accounted for most of the tip because the app calculates the customer’s tip as a percentage of the total. He worked through the rest of the list, including four supplements priced at about $30 each, and left the watch for last, expecting an employee would need to pull it from behind a counter.

The $450 watch changed the whole order

The watch was out of stock. The customer agreed to a similar version priced about $100 higher, but the app wouldn’t let Dylan make the swap because of the price difference, and he said there was no way to add it manually either. Roughly 20 minutes of messages followed, along with a trip to the stockroom and a call to Instacart support.

It isn’t the only recent case where a single item has caused trouble on an Instacart order, with some shoppers saying items have been reported missing after delivery. Support told Dylan the customer would need to place a separate order for the pricier watch, since it couldn’t be folded into the batch already underway.

By the time everything settled, the payout had dropped to about $80, which Dylan pinned directly on the missing watch. “Why does this always happen to me?” he asked at the start of the video, and the two hours in the store gave him plenty of reason to ask.

Percentage-based tips can swing a payout depending on what’s in the cart, a dynamic that has also raised questions elsewhere in gig work about where a customer’s tip actually ends up. Dylan estimated Prop 22 would bring his total closer to $110, well below the $150 or more he thought the order was worth with the watch included.

Commenters mostly focused on whether the swap should have gone through at all. One wrote, “I hate when Instacart tries to regulate somebody else’s money. If the customer wants it, why is it an issue with them,” while another suggested a workaround: “Just say you found the correct watch and just buy the other one. It would go through.” Even the friend who had also been sent the batch chimed in: “You stole that order from me, but I guess you can have it.”

Dylan eventually made it to checkout with the two orders, getting bags for both. But watching the cashier put “the eggs with the f***g lotion and everything all over the place” was apparently enough. “Oh, my god,” he said. “Get me out of here. Get me out of here.”