A grocery shopper claims everything a delivery driver claims — the miles above all — plus the equipment that in-store work specifically requires: the coolers, the insulated bags, the cart, the battery pack that keeps a phone alive through a four-hour shift. What a shopper cannot claim is the part that feels most expensive, which is the hour spent walking a store for an order that paid for twenty minutes.
What can a shopper claim that a plain delivery driver cannot?
The gear the job needs on foot. Shopping puts you in a store with a phone in one hand and a cart in the other, then puts perishable goods in your car for an hour, and both halves generate costs a courier carrying one hot bag does not have. Insulated totes and freezer bags, hard coolers and ice packs, a collapsible cart or trolley, a phone mount and a battery pack, reusable bags bought for the work: each is an ordinary business expense with a receipt behind it.
Everything else on the list is the same as any driver’s. The business share of the phone and data plan, apportioned by actual use and documented once. Tolls and parking where the rules allow them. Platform fees and charges withheld before the money arrived. Bookkeeping software. And, dominating all of it, the miles — which for a shopper run in a distinctive pattern worth its own section.
Do the miles between the store and the customer count?
Yes — the whole working chain is business driving, and for a shopper that chain is longer than it looks. The drive from one batch’s last drop to the next store, the drive between two stores for a split order, the store-to-customer leg, the drive between two customers on a double batch: every one of those is travel in the service of your business, and every one is a mile most shoppers never write down.
The leg that needs a decision is the first one of the day — home to the first store — which sits in the same commuting question that catches out every self-employed driver, and which turns on whether that store functions as a regular place of business for you and on the rest of your facts. IRS Publication 463 covers the travel and commuting rules; the classification guide on this blog covers how to sort the categories in practice. Record the leg either way, then classify it: you can reclassify a recorded trip, and you cannot recover an unrecorded one.
Does the time you spend in the store create a deduction?
No, and this is the most common misconception in shopper work. Deductions are costs you incurred, not hours you were not paid for. An order that took ninety minutes to shop and paid as though it took thirty is a bad order, but the shortfall is not a business expense, not a loss you can claim separately, and not something that appears anywhere on a Schedule C.
The time still matters enormously — it just belongs to a different calculation. Unpaid in-store time is the single biggest drag on a shopper’s effective hourly rate, and the only way to see it is to record hours actually worked alongside what the batch paid. That number changes which batches you accept, which is worth far more than any deduction it could have generated. The effective-hourly-rate post on this blog walks through the arithmetic.
What about the money you spend on the customer’s groceries?
Money fronted for someone else’s order and then reimbursed is not your business expense — it passed through you, and claiming it as a cost while not counting the reimbursement as income would be the same mistake twice. Where platforms issue a payment card for the order, the question usually does not arise at all because the money was never yours.
The case that needs care is the one where the reimbursement is bundled into the figure a platform reports on your year-end form. If a form shows a larger number than you were actually paid for your work, the difference has to be accounted for rather than ignored, because the IRS receives the same form you do. That is a reconciliation question with a real answer in your statements, and it is worth a preparer’s five minutes rather than a guess. The article on disagreeing 1099 figures elsewhere on this blog covers the general shape of that conversation.
How do tips complicate the income picture?
Tips are taxable income, and they are the part of a shopper’s pay most likely to go unrecorded. Some are added in-app after delivery, often days later, and may or may not be included in the figure a platform reports at year end. Some arrive in cash at the door and exist nowhere at all except in your memory for about four hours. Both are income; only one has any chance of appearing on a form.
The practical consequence is that your own ledger has to be the authoritative record of what you earned, not a copy of the platform’s. Record the batch pay and the tip separately, at the end of the shift, per platform. That separation does double duty: it gives you a defensible income total, and it tells you which stores and which neighbourhoods actually tip — which is the operational question hiding inside the tax one.
What does a shopper’s record-keeping look like in practice?
Two minutes at the end of the shift and a photograph at the register. Classify the day’s drives, enter what each batch paid and what it tipped, and photograph any receipt for something you bought for yourself — the cooler, the bags, the charger — onto an expense record that says what it was for. Everything else is downloading statements once a quarter and reconciling them against what you already have.
BrewGig is built around exactly that loop: drives recorded automatically in the background on Pro and above, receipts photographed onto expenses, earnings and tips tagged by platform, and a tax estimate that runs against the real tax year rather than a guess.
BrewGig is an independent app and is not affiliated with, endorsed by or partnered with Instacart, Shipt or any other platform; all platform names here are the trademarks of their respective owners.