When Shipt decided to keep its headquarters in Birmingham in 2018, the state and local governments agreed to pay the company at least $19 million in combined cash incentives and tax breaks, if it met goals of hiring hundreds of corporate workers and investing in its local presence.

Five years later, the online grocery delivery platform has not delivered on all of those promises. Its corporate workforce has increased, but it’s hired hundreds less than the 881 new employees it promised. It’s unclear how much of the company’s capital funds it invested into its HQ in downtown Birmingham after promising Alabama a $10 million investment.

In response, the government has withheld most of those promised incentives – with the city, Jefferson County and the state’s workforce development agency paying just under $3 million, combined. Now, Shipt says it won’t ask for anymore public funds.

Alabama hasn’t paid the company a penny in cash or tax credits. Shipt canceled its agreement with the state Department of Commerce at the end of March, the department’s spokeswoman Stefania C. Jones said.

“The company requested to terminate the agreement because they no longer expected to have the jobs they committed to,” Jones told AL.com.

Julie Coop, a spokeswoman for Shipt, said the company’s business model through same-day delivery looked a lot different before the Covid pandemic. Now, she said, the company wants to allow Birmingham, Jefferson County and the state of Alabama to “reallocate those funds” to other companies.

“Shipt’s 2018 projections evaluated what we believed, at that time, it would take to operate a national business at scale. When consumer demand skyrocketed, we scaled faster than previously imaginable to meet those critical needs,” Coop told AL.com. “During that time, we successfully took our business nationwide, nearly tripled our Birmingham-based workforce, built out multiple floors in Shipt Tower, and invested hundreds of hours in training and development, particularly of our Alabama workforce.”

Through its agreement with Alabama Industrial Development Training, the state’s workforce development agency, Shipt received $1.1 million in funds for its job training and recruitment efforts, the company said. That program is now closed, after 760 employees received 160 hours of the on-the-job training.

So far, Birmingham has paid Shipt $1,502,635.95, a spokesman for the city’s Department of Innovation and Economic Opportunity told AL.com. Shipt said it received the city’s most recent payment of $405,000 in July.

Shipt’s agreement with the Jefferson County Commission started in March 2018 and ended in December 2020. During that time, the county paid Shipt $254,000 for 127 jobs that the company submitted that met its salary requirements (at least $60,000), said county spokeswoman Helen Hays.

Now, Shipt counts nearly 850 corporate employees in Alabama, most of whom are based at the Birmingham HQ, the company said. Five years ago, Shipt had “more than 300 employees” at its headquarters, AL.com previously reported, and promised to hire 881 more.

As for its headquarters, since the expansion announcement, Shipt moved into the former Wells Fargo building 420 20th St. North as the anchor tenant. But the company declined to say how much it’s spent on capital investments there.

Founded in Birmingham in 2014, Shipt has been called an “Uber for groceries” and also has an office in San Francisco. Target acquired the company for $550 million in 2017, and it operates independently as a subsidiary.

Since then, the company has hit some snags with its local delivery workers, who work for Shipt as independent contractors. In October 2020, nearly two dozen Shipt workers protested the company and its new pay structure at its headquarters, asking for higher wages, health insurance coverage and paid sick time.

Otherwise, Shipt’s corporate story has been marked by successful milestones over the last several years. That includes a growth in shoppers, retail partnerships and expansion to new stores in major metro areas, and new corporate leadership, keeping up with a surge in business sparked by the Covid pandemic’s changes to shopping patterns and flexible work. The company works with nearly 5,000 independent contractors who are Shipt shoppers in Alabama.