[octernion]

Please contact our support team in these cases, we absolutely aren't deliberately choosing more expensive items in order to profit -- see my comment elsewhere on this article, but we primarily look at your previous preferences and the preferences of other customers.

If you chose the cheapest possible option, it does seem inevitable that any replacement would be more expensive :-)

And, sorry that we were frustrating to you.

(engineer @ Instacart)

[firefixfox]

If this is really happening frequently, could it the pickers going for items they already know where to find?

[shams93]

Yeah as somebody who was a personal shopper before the internet getting requested items can be really tricky there is no guarantee they won't run out of something there is no Ralfs API to plug into to give real-time inventory information.

[philwelch]

> there is no Ralfs API to plug into to give real-time inventory information

Which is why "send people to grocery stores" is going to lose out to more vertically integrated models.

[octernion]

  there is no Ralfs [sic] API to plug into to give real-time inventory information

[citation needed] :) there are many ways to "vertically integrate" with retailers (and yes, some do in fact offer a real-time API of what is in store, and our availability information for those is fantastic)