For the past couple of years I seem to get discount coupons for Instacart semi-regularly. They are also often running promotions allowing you to get 3-6 months of their premium service if you sign up with a particular credit card. So with those, I think it can be worth it, depending on the store and what you are buying. When we were living near a Wal-Mart it was a great way to get basics like eggs, milk, frozen veg, peanut butter, coffee, etc. Wal-mart doesn't mark up their prices and the stuff I ordered there was not too much room to f*** up as it was all packaged. A few times I have tried ordering produce and it is always a crapshoot. Like I order a cabbage and instead get a head of iceberg lettuce, or just the items picked are not great quality, at the "wrong" point of ripeness, etc. I guess from a purely money perspective the errors can be a way of making IC "worth it" because you can request a refund on anything that's wrong. e.g. if you order 5lbs of cheese and they instead give you 1lb of cheese but charge you for 5lbs, you can complain and they'll refund you for 5lbs of cheese, so ta-da you just got a free pound of cheese. Or one time I ordered several dozen eggs and a couple in one of the dozens was cracked, I complained and got refunded for ALL the eggs, not just the cracked dozen. I feel a bit weird and scammy about this kind of thing and so at this point I'm really only likely to make a complaint if ignoring it results in a fairly costly error for me (so I would probably complain about 4 missing pounds of cheese, but I might let a couple of eggs out of 3 dozen slide).
We no longer live in an area where Walmart is available and the best Instacart option is Aldi. I currently have a free trial of the premium membership and there's an Aldi near my kids school, so if IC sends me a discount coupon I will use it to place an order for pickup in conjunction with a school visit. I prefer the pickup option because the fees are much lower (if you have the premium there is no fee and they give you a credit to use on your next order). Unfortunately, Aldi DOES markup their items so you have to be a little more thoughtful about what you order. Overall, I probably wouldn't use it without a discount. I won't say I "love" grocery shopping but I don't hate it and I do have enough schedule flexibility that I can go in off-peak hours. I'm usually also able to schedule it to tag on to another necessary trip (e.g. if I have a meeting at kid's school, that will be grocery day), or at the very least I will walk/bike to the store and then I get some exercise benefit.
The one other service we have tried is Imperfect. Again, not worth it if paying full price, but every few months they seem to send me a code for a substantial discount which bring some of their items down to a price point that is a bit below the local grocery. So I might use that as a way of getting some fancy cheese, bacon, sausage, smoked salmon, etc. at relatively low prices (all those things are still kind of $$ even with the discount so I wouldn't always get them, but as an occasional treat, it's nice).
