Instacart's app was so overwhelmed by panic shopping that it offered up customers printer paper in lieu of toilet paper

• Instacart has been grappling with a surge in demand in the past few months as customers in lockdown increasingly rely on online grocery delivery options.
• The surge in demand has put pressure on all areas of its business.
• A recent Bloomberg report shed light on some of the challenges it has faced because of this. In one example, Bloomberg said that the app has been so overwhelmed at times that it had "repeatedly suggested" that customers looking to buy Cottonelle toilet paper should try printer paper instead.
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Instacart has been feeling the heat over the past few months as pent up shoppers turn to online grocery delivery options during the lockdown.

The surge in demand has put pressure on all areas of its business and in the past few weeks, its CEO has announced a series of changes it is taking in order to get a handle on this. Not least, it's hiring around 550,000 new shoppers – independent contractors who pick and deliver groceries for its customers.

In a deep-dive into the company's struggles over the past few months, Bloomberg reporters Ellen Huet and Lizette Chapman shed light on just how difficult it has been for Instacart to adapt to this giant spike in demand, which occurred almost overnight, and some of the problems that it has encountered along the way.

In one example, the reporters noted that the app has been so overwhelmed that it had "repeatedly suggested" that customers looking to buy Cottonelle toilet paper should try printer paper instead.

Instacart's CEO Apoorva Mehta insisted that it is working to rectify these kinds of errors and will soon bring back its one-hour delivery service, which went out the window when demand shot up. During this time it has had to quintuple its server capacity and some employees are doing 18-hour workdays and seven-day workweeks just to keep up, according to Bloomberg.

Instacart's president, Nilam Ganenthiran, said in an interview with a Credit Suisse food retail analyst in early April that each day was the equivalent of Black Friday, retail's busiest shopping day of the year.

He said that the company was seeing order volumes at levels that it had previously forecasted for the next two to four years. "Customers are coming online in droves," he said.

He's anticipating that many of these new customers will stick around after restrictions lift as the US could see a permanent change in how US shoppers buy their groceries.

Before the pandemic, "awareness wasn't there across the US," he said, "and the bulk of the country didn't know that a service like ours existed. That has changed ... customers know that for the times that they need it, a service like ours exists."

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