The Problem with Gig Work
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How did Heidi and Willie first get involved in gig work with Shipt?
A show where philosophy and reality meet.
From Slate. Heidi was an insurance agent for 16 years in Florida, in a region called the Treasure Coast, about 125 miles north of Miami, along the Atlantic shore. It's a little bit of paradise, with rivers and estuaries and palm trees. Today's story starts with her journey from full-time employee to gig worker.
Really what kind of changed was motherhood for the third time. Basically, I drove an hour away to North Palm Beach to my office. When I had my daughter, I don't know, something inside of me changed. You know, you're like, I can't be this far away.
Heidi isn't her real name, by the way. She decided to use a pseudonym for reasons that will become clear later. Meanwhile, around the same time in Denton, Texas, a suburb outside of Dallas, Willie Solis had slightly different reasons for starting gig work.
I was working as a construction worker, and I ran my own business since 2008. I was in the process of transitioning to a different state of Florida and moving my business over there. However, it required some licensing, and so there was going to be some downtime.
Heidi and Willie didn't know each other, at least not at that point, in late 2019 and early 2020. What they had in common was that they both chose shopping and delivery of groceries and supplies as the gig of their choice. And they were both providers for their families, not part-timers looking for extra money. The other thing they had in common was they both stumbled upon the same shopping app, Shipt, S-H-I-P-T, which at the time primarily served Target stores. It's since expanded to a lot of other big chains. The primary reason Heidi and Willie were attracted to Shipt was their pay model.
Seven and a half percent of the expected order total plus a flat $5.
And that was a very clear, transparent pay model where I knew that if I had a $100 order, I would make $12.50. If I continued to upsell the customer or make that purchase higher, then I would get more money.
Upselling means that if Willie can't find an item in store at Target, he was allowed with Shipt to contact the customer to see if he could substitute it for an item that costs more. And with a 7.5% commission, that meant he could make just a little more on the order. Instacart, the main rival to Shipt, didn't let you do that. And for both Heidi and Willie, going with Shipt initially paid off.
I really enjoyed it. The pay was equally as good. I was making roughly between $18 to $25 an hour, depending on the day.
I needed to make $6.50 every week. And that was my bottom. That was like just surviving. Golden days, I would do 40 orders-ish. And I was really making anywhere between $1,100 and $1,300 a week.
And then, over the course of a few months, something happened.
At first, I was really noticing $200 to $300 in difference to the negative for me. I was then doing $50 to $55 in a week. So I was really working a lot harder for a lot less.
So an order that was a $100 order, the shopper would be getting like $9.50. While it may not sound like a lot of a decrease, it is a significant amount when you start multiplying it times the number of orders that we do.
SHIP's payment model went from a transparent, commission-based model to a black box algorithm.
The pay change came all of a sudden without any notice and it was really affecting people.
The way that we are paid makes no sense. Why is this paying this and this is paying this? I mean, you could sit there and rack your brain for hours, days, weeks, and you're not going to make sense of it.
I had a conversation with one lady. She didn't know how she was going to make her mortgage payment or her car payment and feed her children. That conversation with that lady really struck a nerve with me, and that's when I decided somebody has to do something.
Heidi and
Willie did do something. From Slate, this is HiFi Nation, philosophy in story form. Recording from Princeton University, here's Barry Lamb.
The pandemic fueled an exponential surge in gig work, particularly in food service and grocery delivery.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
How did Heidi and Willie first get involved in gig work with Shipt?
0:00–7:10
2
What changed in Shipt’s pay algorithm and why did it matter to workers?
7:10–12:43
3
How did the workers organize and start collecting pay data?
12:43–18:36
4
What role did MIT data scientist Dan Kalachi play in analyzing the algorithm?
18:36–24:01
5
What did the analysis reveal about pay differences between V1 and V2?
24:01–31:06
6
Why do gig‑platforms claim their new models are fairer, and what do philosophers say?
31:06–37:55
7
How are legal battles and regulation shaping the future of gig work?
37:55–45:12
8
What new tools and worker‑owned platforms could transform gig‑economy labor?
45:12–51:18