Comment by taurath

Here's Instacart's latest quarterly report which tells you exactly where the money is going:

https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001579091/a4bcc10...

For the last 6 months ending June this year, they made $2b in revenue. They report the "cost of revenue" aka what they pay the "shoppers" aka laborers and businesses, plus any deals they made was around $500m, leaving a gross profit of $1.5b.

Then they spent $150m on operations (running the service) and customer support.

Then they spent $370m on R&D (software developers, product people, QA, executives)

Then they spent $460m on Sales and Marketing (adverstising, promotions, business deals, executives)

Then they spent $190m on General and Administrative (accounting, HR, business development, CEO, executives)

That left them with $250m of net profit. Oh, yeah, and they've paid out something like $10 billion in share buybacks in the last calendar year.

They spent three times what they pay their laborers across the entire world on JUST administrative costs. Any problem you have with laborers, or their insane fees, all goes into this corporate slush fund for the operators of this company and the higher-class workers. This is the rule, not the exception.

If you work for these companies, know you are paying your mortgage literally by the spines of the desperate workers your company decides it can exploit for the benefit of shareholders.