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Unrelated:

Can I instacart w/o facebook? <strike>Can I instacart w/o an iPhone? (seems to have a web interface)</strike>

I'm in Palo Alto, so I fit the first requirement on space. I also have a desire to have this service and pay them my dollars occasionally.

Edit: Just realized that I missed the point of this post.

The iPhone app is actually why I never use this. It's too cumbersome to put together an order. It took my girlfriend and I just as long to find everything I wanted (no efficient way to browse) and put together the order as it would have taken us to just go to Safeway ourselves.
Finally! I've had half-finished Instacart orders sitting on my phone, just because I was too lazy to pick all the items from the mobile interface and kept losing track of what I still needed (don't judge me!).

I just tried the site and ordered my weekly groceries within a few minutes. It works great and has a refreshingly small amount of cruft. Just a searchable, categorized list of items, a shopping cart and a checkout button. Good work!

First thing I noticed when I logged in is that it carried over my shopping cart from my phone. Fantastic integration, makes a lot of sense!
I checked out the InstaCart source code because I had a hunch it was built with Bootstrap. The header comments were hilarious.

"Yes, it's Bootstrap. Don't like it? Join us and fix it. Email &#106;&#111;&#098;&#115;&#064;&#105;&#110;&#115;&#116;&#097;&#099;&#097;&#114;&#116;&#046;&#099;&#111;&#109; "

Maybe I will email jobs@instacart.com ...

I haven't tried the service since I'm not in the coverage area but it would be nice if you could take a pic of a grocery reciept and let it automatically import an order
That's a difficult problem to solve. Nevermind the OCR issues surrounding different store's receipts, the line item descriptions are so varied and atrocious, it would be a very large undertaking to match them against Instacart's existing product database.

Good idea, just hard to execute, and I'm not sure it would have a sufficient payoff to be worth it.

Not if they did a partnership with a store to match line item data back to products.
Did Instacart stop with the iPhone notification SPAM?
There's no way to browse the products available without logging in. Maybe I'm missing something?