SAN FRANCISCO: When Emily Yang, a San Francisco tech worker, is running out of cat food, she taps an app called Instacart to order a new bag of kibble to be delivered to her door within hours. For dinner, she often orders through Sprig and Munchery, app-powered services that bring fresh organic meals to her home.
Her experience highlights how a proliferation of instant-delivery apps has turned the smartphone into a sort of magic remote control that can almost beam items straight to your door: A burrito, a tennis racket, even a week's worth of groceries. There are now so many of these apps, especially serving cities like San Francisco and New York, that you can tap an app even to do your laundry or mail packages.
But instant gratification has a price. With the delivery apps, tech companies act as a middleman connecting merchants and couriers with customers, and they pass the service charges on to the consumer. The fees are also more obfuscated and complex than you might expect when you, say, order a pizza. The receipt for the pie would clearly state its cost and the delivery fee. For some consumers like Yang, the fees are no big deal. "The cat food I get is more expensive than normal cat food anyway, so unless the price is severely different, I don't notice too much," she said about Instacart's charges.
But if you don't pay close attention to how these companies charge for their services, your money could disappear like magic. I discovered this firsthand when I tested four popular instant delivery apps over the last week to take a closer look at their fee structures.
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