Instacart to provide shoppers with face masks, hand sanitizers and thermometers

Instacart will start providing health and safety kits to its full-service shoppers. These kits will include a face mask, hand sanitizer and a thermometer, the company announced today.

The kits will be available for free to shoppers starting next week. Shoppers, according to Instacart, will be able to request a kit by registering with their Instacart shopper email address. In order to keep up with demand, Instacart will update its inventory daily. For in-store shoppers, Instacart will bring the face masks to shoppers at their respective retail locations.

"Our teams have been working around the clock over the last few weeks to proactively secure personal protective equipment like hand sanitizer and face masks, without taking away valuable resources from healthcare workers given inventory delays and global supply scarcity," Instacart President Nilam Ganenthiran said in a statement. "We want to provide customers with an essential service they can rely on to get their groceries and household goods, while also offering safe and flexible earnings opportunities to Instacart personal shoppers. As COVID-19 evolves, today's health and safety solutions will be tomorrow's table stakes, and our teams are working quickly to introduce new services and features to ensure our shopper community is supported as this situation unfolds."

This announcement comes amid worker strikes led by the folks over at Gig Workers Collective. Last Friday, a group of Instacart shoppers announced plans to strike and not return to work until the company meets its demands. Those demands were for Instacart to provide personal protective equipment at no cost to workers and hazard pay of $5 extra per order, change the default tip to 10%, extend the sick pay policy to those who have a doctor's note for a pre-existing condition that may make them more susceptible to contracting the virus and extend the deadline to qualify for those benefits beyond April 8th.

Instacart has since extended that deadline and changed the default tip to a customer's last tip, but shoppers say that's not enough. In a Medium post, workers called Instacart's response "insulting" and "a sick joke.

"It's abhorrent that it took this long for them to act, but on the bright side, it shows that a strike will work to change their behavior," the group wrote in a Medium post.

Instacart is not the only company stepping up its safety protocols. Earlier today, Amazon said it would start providing surgical masks for its warehouse workers and employees at Whole Foods.