Target's Shipt delivery app workers describe a culture of retaliation and fear, say its algorithm pushes them to buy gifts for customers to boost their ratings
In late October, Ashley Johnson, a single mom and seasoned gig worker in a quiet Seattle suburb, tweeted about the decline …
What is new here is the mechanism: Shipt workers say the platform's own rating pressure nudges them into spending their own money on customer gifts, while describing retaliation for pushing back. That puts Target's last-mile grocery operation at the center of a scrutiny cycle its peers have already been through.
First-order effects
Shipt shoppers absorb direct financial costs — buying gifts to protect ratings — and face what they describe as retaliation, raising immediate labor-relations and reputational risk for Target as Shipt's owner.
Workers like Ashley Johnson, speaking publicly from Seattle, turn individual grievances into a documented pattern that journalists and organizers can cite against the platform.
Second-order effects
Instacart, Postmates, and Amazon — already under fire for Mentor's driver-scoring bugs and punitive task-assignment logic — face renewed pressure to explain their own rating and deactivation systems, since each new exposé raises the bar for all of them.
Retailers relying on gig fleets for same-day delivery must weigh whether algorithmic cost-shifting onto shoppers undermines the service quality that justifies the model in the first place.
Third-order effects
If the pattern holds across platforms, algorithmic management — ratings, acceptance rates, deactivation — becomes the focal point for gig-labor regulation and litigation, much as minimum-pay fights defined earlier rounds.
Platforms may be pushed toward making scoring criteria legible and contestable, shifting the economics of gig work from invisible penalties to auditable rules.
The trend: Delivery platforms are converging on algorithmic management as their core labor-control tool, and each exposé — Instacart's, Postmates', Amazon's, now Shipt's — feeds a growing push to regulate how those scores set workers' fates.
Workers of the Target-owned delivery app Shipt say that if they don't buy gifts for rich customers with their own money, an assignment algorithm will downrank them out of lucrative shopping jobs https://www.vice.com/... https://twitter.com/...
This is what happens when you put a culture that makes poor people prove they are worthy of basic human rights on top of unchecked capitalism. https://twitter.com/...
I thought I was pretty well-versed in the absolute hellscape that is the gig economy, but these stories from @target's Shipt brings the dystopia to new levels of too-on-the-nose-for-fiction. Classifying these workers as contractors is a portal of abuse. https://www.vice.com/... h…
Even Orwell couldn't have foreseen the tortured language used by these gig-economy sweatshops. To have your livelihood pulled by petty tyrants, and then for that to just be called DEACTIVATED. JFC. I wonder how people like @billsmitha sleep at night. https://www.vice.com/...
While @target eliminates human cashiers and forces customers to use self-checkouts, it's employing others to grovel to the rich in a dystopian nightmare. Cool. Cool. https://twitter.com/...
How is this real life? How is this not some dark dytospian satire? Read what ‘bringing the magic’ means in the quoted extract and prepare to be a bit sick in your mouth. https://twitter.com/...
“According to these shoppers, the switch to an opaque algorithm—like those that govern the majority of gig work companies—came without any advance warning.” #Shipt #GigEconomy #GigWorkers https://gizmodo.com/...
@billsmitha Shipt raised ~$65m and sold for $550m to @target. It was funded by @eventuresVC, @greycroftvc, and Harbert Growth Partners, who got their fucking 10x, while gig-economy workers got a new exploitive pay algorithm, more job uncertainty, and continued sociopathic leaders…
i don't understand what the long game is for gig work like this. ok, if i speak up i get fired and they replace me instantly - but forever? what happens after they churn through an area's entire worker base? is this just smash and grab but as a company https://twitter.com/...
i thought i had lost the ability to be shocked by this kind of stuff anymore, but making your low-wage gig workers buy hot cocoa for rich people in order to gain the favor of the algorithm that decides how much work they get is just absolutely, astonishingly appalling https://twi…
So many #gigeconomy platforms think they can “revolutionize” an industry, but they're truly only good at one thing: paying the folks who make the platform possible as little as possible. https://gizmodo.com/...
Sometimes “dystopian hellscape” doesn't quite cut it and I feel that I need to come up with something bleaker. This is one of those times. https://twitter.com/...
This is some next-level ish. Not good enough to actually do the job rich people hired you for—you have to praise them and grovel for the opportunity. https://twitter.com/...
You just can't make some shit up. Gig economy workers, who have to contend with an algorithm deciding their pay, apparently expected to reverse tip rich customers to whom they deliver 😳 https://www.vice.com/... https://twitter.com/...
Scoop: Workers at the Target-owned delivery app, Shipt, say the company has created a culture of retaliation and censorship. These gig workers have a lot to say—but they're terrified to speak out. I talked to 8 of them. Here's what they had to say: https://www.vice.com/...