There’s a new buzz in the food delivery sector for the Berkshire students this year. Instacart invaded the Berkshire School last spring, bringing confused drivers, an abnormal amount of produce, and very concerned dorm parents. 

 Instacart is a local grocery delivery application that links a customer with a shopper who does the grocery shopping and delivery for them. This application is very helpful to the Berkshire student body because it replaces the need to go on weekly town trips for groceries by paying shoppers to do it for them.

 While this service is helpful to students by eliminating the need to shop themselves, it also raises concern for campus safety. All Berkshire delivery services, like Romas or MealGopher, have instructions to deliver to the student center. This is where the problem starts with Instacart.

Instacart is operated on a personal level, meaning that individual shoppers receive delivery instructions from their customers instead of instructions from the school. 

Mr. Quilty quickly shut this down in an all-school email, stating that, “all Instacart deliveries need to be delivered to the Rovensky Student Center” and that lack of cooperation with this will lead the school to “stop all deliveries if Instacart is seen delivering to dorms.”

 We interviewed a student who we witnessed picking up their groceries outside their dorm on a late Sunday afternoon. We will refer to them as ‘anonymous student’ to preserve their privacy. This is what she had to say:

 “When I first signed up for Instacart in the spring of 2019, I originally put down CGR as my drop off location,” confesses the anonymous student “the issue now is that, after receiving an email saying that students are required to get their food dropped off at the student center, I can’t change my drop off location, and have to stealthily get my groceries from in front of CGR.”

 We followed up with this anonymous student a week later; they since have figured out how to change their drop off location to avoid receiving points from the dorm parent on duty. 

 So the question remains: will students get their groceries delivered to the student center out of cooperation, or will they continue to risk it all and get it delivered to the dorms out of convenience?