Convenience Bee: Truly smart, or just turning people into machines?
I.“You have been penalised and demoted to shop assistant”
A few months ago, Ms L, a store manager at a Convenience Bee branch in Beijing, suddenly received this message on her handheld terminal. In her daily routine, she had to keep a constant eye on this device, which looked like a smartphone, completing tasks that popped up on the screen every few minutes.
But at this moment, the notification on the screen read “Replacement of Store Manager”, appearing as commonplace as a request to restock shelves, mop the floor, or wipe down the counters.
Ms L had been the manager of this store since the first half of 2023. As for the reason for her demotion, she remains unaware to this day. “From start to finish, no one communicated this to me; no one told me why. All I received was that single sentence from the system, and that was that.”
She suspects the reason for her demotion may have been her failure to complete the “Store Manager’s Self-Check” over the preceding few days—a daily requirement to inspect hygiene, product placement, and other store conditions, then upload photos to the system.
Ms L recalls that some long-unused coffee and drink machines needed to be removed from the store. She wanted to take the opportunity to reorganise the vacated space, stocking it with room-temperature mineral water and soft drinks to boost turnover.
To achieve this, she spent a week working two hours of unpaid overtime every day on top of her twelve-hour shift, working from 7 am until 9 pm.
Under such high-intensity labour, Ms L felt “justified” in sidelining the trivial “Self-Check” tasks. After all, there were priorities, and she believed everything she was doing was for the benefit of the store’s sales.
She couldn’t fathom it: she had been doing everything possible to increase revenue for Convenience Bee, so why was she demoted?
“Thinking back on it truly chills the heart,” said Ms L, who believes Convenience Bee’s management is “entirely inhumane”.
Regrettably, Ms L’s grievances will never be heard by Convenience Bee, a company that prides itself on being “intelligent”.
II.“The Robot is an Idiot”
Experienced store managers are a scarce resource in the convenience store industry. Convenience Bee claims that while traditional convenience stores take two years to train a manager, they only need six months. In the eyes of founder Zhuang Chenchao, it is precisely this shortage of managers that has caused predecessors like FamilyMart and 7-Eleven to “expand too slowly”.
Convenience Bee’s solution to this is to replace managerial decision-making with algorithmic systems. Zhuang Chenchao seems to sincerely believe that algorithms designed by a group of engineers in an office can remotely understand and control every operational variable across all its stores. In one speech, he confidently asserted: “Every human node leads to a decline in overall efficiency.” Consequently, the task of front-line employees is limited to “obeying system instructions and providing a good service experience for consumers.”
Are algorithms truly smarter than store managers?
For convenience stores with limited space, the core factor determining revenue and profit is the precise matching of supply with consumer demand. To prove the superiority of their algorithms, Convenience Bee claimed to have conducted an experiment: they selected 10 experienced 7-Eleven managers and asked them to reduce a store’s SKU (Stock Keeping Unit, or product categories) by 10%. As a result, sales dropped by 5% the following day. However, using the solution provided by Convenience Bee’s algorithm, sales decreased by only 0.7%.
“The system goes into such detail that it tells you exactly how many meat buns and vegetable buns to make, and how many lunch boxes to prepare,” Ms L said. But from her actual observations, the results of the algorithm-led supply were far from satisfactory.
“Sometimes there are massive surpluses of some items and desperate shortages of others. Some crisps that clearly don’t sell are delivered in huge quantities; conversely, some drinks that sell very well aren’t delivered the next day. Our store is surrounded by office workers, so logically we should have a wider variety of bread, but we only ever get a few types. We complain about it every time.”
Last winter, because of the cold weather, customers preferred drinking room-temperature mineral water. Ms L placed some on the shelves, only for the store’s patrolling robot to photograph them and flag the items as being in the wrong designated location, forcing her to rectify the display.
“Customers who come in all praise it, saying: ‘Your robot is so intelligent!’ But my colleagues and I sometimes can’t help but curse that robot for being an idiot!”
Even when they felt the supply was unreasonable, Ms L and her colleagues had no way to report this to Convenience Bee. The system had already pre-planned the stock and dictated the exact placement of every item on the shelves. If Ms L had an issue with the stock, the only thing she could do was “assign a task” to the middle-office staff via the system for them to handle. “The process is very complicated; we basically can’t find anyone to talk to, and no one cares about such small matters.”
Despite Liu Lu’s repeated requests to reduce the supply of hot meals, the response she received was: “According to calculations by the algorithmic system, there are still sales opportunities for hot meals at this store… the algorithmic system does not yet have a related operational SOP (Standard Operating Procedure), and human intervention is impossible.” As a result, Liu Lu, despite being the franchisee, had no authority to promptly increase or decrease the stock of specific products. As the front-line operator who understands her customers best, she could only watch customers leave and bear the operating losses caused by the massive amount of wasted products.
III.“The little bees must always be there”
Convenience Bee’s solution is to use algorithms to break down an employee’s daily labour into 70 to 80 simple tasks, which are then issued to the employee via a handheld terminal.
Ms L started her role after only a week of induction training. “The main part of the training was how to operate the handheld system. As long as you know how to use the device and complete the tasks under its instructions, you can basically do the job. I became a store manager not long after.”
Ms L always tells new employees: “Just get on with it!” This is the experience she has summed up from working at Convenience Bee: do not have doubts or think too much, because the algorithmic system has already planned your day “crystal clear”.
“After working there for a while, you feel like a walking machine. From the moment I enter the store at 7 am, I start preparing hot breakfast; once 9:30 hits, I have to start preparing lunch.”
“We are not allowed to communicate with customers, because Convenience Bee considers communicating with customers a waste of time. However, customers are actually very efficient at ordering themselves; I can sell over thirty hot meals by myself during a single lunch period.”
Ms L says that once the lunch rush is over, employees do not get to relax. Every few minutes, the handheld terminal assigns a task, all of which are tedious chores like wiping shelves, sweeping the floor, restocking, and stocktaking. Employees are constantly urged on by tasks, remaining in a state of perpetual busyness until they finish work at 7 pm.
“Sometimes I didn’t understand the point of wiping the shelves over and over again, but I later found out their guiding principle is ‘people must not be idle’.”
Boredom and heavy workloads can make employees slack off, which is when the “electronic overseer” steps in. In Ms L’s store, over 30 cameras on the ceiling constantly capture the state of the employees. “When I first started, an older employee told me that as long as the machine sees your hand on the shelf, it’s fine—you don’t have to be that thorough. I didn’t dare at first, but later I learned how to just go through the motions.”
“Little Bees must always be here, okay! Little Bees must always be here, okay!”
IV. “Using turnover to fill turnover”
Explaining her conflict, Ms L said: “Actually, Convenience Bee has its perks. For people like me who face great pressure in life, the tasks there are relatively simple and easy to pick up. As long as you’re willing to work, you can earn a decent salary every month.”
In these 24-hour convenience stores, staff are split into two seamless shifts of 12 hours each. For those willing, it is possible to work 12 hours a day, 365 days a year.
One month, she worked a total of 360 hours, rushing from dawn until dusk, living in a blur. When she received her pay of over 10,000 yuan at the end of the month, she recalled that it was the happiest moment of her time there.
Being demoted from store manager to shop assistant was a devastating blow for Ms L. Losing her share of the turnover dividends meant she could only earn the staff wage of 22 yuan per hour, causing her monthly income to plummet. As an ordinary staff member, she could no longer work at a fixed store as she had when she was manager; instead, the system could redeploy her daily to any store within a 10-kilometre radius to fill vacancies caused by sick leave, resignations, or sackings.
“Most staff earn a hourly wage of 22 yuan while facing this extremely oppressive working environment. Consequently, the staff turnover rate at Convenience Bee is incredibly high.”
Ms L believes that Convenience Bee attempts to solve this problem by “using turnover to fill turnover”. However, the instability of her workplace became unbearable, and she ultimately chose not to continue working for Convenience Bee as a shop assistant.
V. When humans are alienated into flesh-and-blood machines
Algorithms can indeed achieve a degree of “cost reduction and efficiency increase” in areas such as product variety, pricing, footfall tracking, shrinkage recording, and matching optimal delivery routes. Leaning into this concept of intelligence, Convenience Bee attracted significant investment and achieved breakneck expansion in its early stages.
However, from late 2021, reports of layoffs and store closures began to emerge, and the company launched its “Hibernation Plan” internally in 2022. According to reports by Snow Leopard Finance, by February 2024, the number of Convenience Bee stores had fallen from a peak of nearly 3,000 to just over 1,000—a stark contrast to the steady growth seen across the rest of the convenience store industry.
Moving abruptly from “breakneck expansion” to “hibernation”, this algorithm-led operational model failed to spark a “revolution” in the industry. At the very least, Convenience Bee’s algorithm was not as miraculous as the founder claimed or the investors imagined.
As algorithms increasingly encroach upon every facet of business and life, Convenience Bee’s miscalculation serves as a reminder: an arrogant reliance on algorithms that ignores the insights and experience of frontline workers can actually harm a business. More importantly, the blind worship of high technology devalues human creativity, alienating staff into flesh-and-blood machines that numbly execute algorithmic commands. In a sense, staff and managers like Ms L were not treated as living, thinking human beings, but as extensions of the machine, performing the tasks that the machine was not yet capable of completing.
Ms L will find another job after leaving Convenience Bee. Yet beyond this company—across manufacturing, finance, services, and even agriculture—countless technological innovations involving algorithms continue to emerge.
Amidst the roar of these algorithmic machines, how can we ensure that technology contributes to creation rather than becoming a new mountain of oppression and alienation for the worker? This is not only a matter of economic efficiency, but of human dignity. To answer these questions, we must maintain a critical eye on the technology itself while seeking answers beyond it.
Unless otherwise stated, all photographs were taken by the author
Editor: Wang Hao Layout: Shiwu