What Happened When Gig Workers Became Heroes

By Lindsey D. Cameron, Curtis Chan, and Michel Anteby

February 11, 2023

The COVID-19 pandemic transformed service work, especially for surrogate shoppers. During that first year, when simply going outside was a scary proposition, consumers turned to gig workers on platforms such as Door Dash, Instacart, and Shipt to bring household essentials and creature comforts right to their doors. Suddenly, these low-wage earners were celebrated alongside highly paid doctors and nurses, with appreciative consumers leaving them generous tips, handmade thank-you notes, and signs of gratitude. The adulation flattered Instacart workers like Gerald Timothee, who told The New York Times, “It’s all about us right now. We are holding this city together. I feel like a hero.”

But not every shopper felt the same way. In our published study, we examined how individual workers reacted to the sudden moralization of their jobs and the consequences for firms dealing with a fast-shifting public narrative. We conducted extensive interviews with 44 Instacart workers at two different points in time and combined those coded interviews with additional data to reveal three distinct responses. Workers either blithely accepted the hero label and the accolades that came with it, believing that their work was morally worthy. We called that group “Skippers” because they skipped over the typical struggles along the hero’s journey. Even though the skippers had a generally positive view of Instacart, they didn’t stay on the platform once the hero narrative died down.

Another set of workers we called “Stallers” flatly rejected the hero label and saw nothing morally exceptional about shopping for others. They held Instacart in low esteem, as they did most of their customers. But they kept on working beyond the worst of the pandemic because they needed the money.

Finally, there were the “Strugglers.” As the name implies, these workers lived with ambiguity and struggled to make sense of becoming overnight heroes. They often went the extra mile for customers in order to rationalize their work, yet their mixed view of Instacart and their customers worsened over time.

All three of these reactions have important implications for platforms such as Instacart, which must constantly acquire new workers, and shows how a moralized public narrative can backfire. Our study also helps deepen understanding about gig workers – a growing segment of our economy – who must make meaning out of their tasks without the social structure and defined physical space of traditional work.