Business War in the Deluge, Riders’ Bitter Summer

Take Beijing this summer, which was battered by a string of unseasonal storms. The extreme downpour that began on 24 July reportedly delivered a year’s worth of rain in just four days. When the rain came down that hard, every glance out of the window revealed nothing but a blank white expanse. Roads, pavements, traffic lights, the flow of cars, billboards, shops, shopping centres, apartment blocks – all of it swallowed by the deluge, as though the entire city had ground to a halt, so quiet that only the relentless hiss of rain could be heard. Cooped up indoors – even customers waiting for their takeout to arrive – people have no way of knowing what those riders still hurtling along the soaked roads are going through.

It’s been four years since I last worked as a rider myself, yet I wanted to know how my former colleagues were coping amid one extreme weather event after another.

I. Feet Soaked Raw by the Rain

While we talked, he kept flexing his feet on the spot. He said the entire sole had gone numb, yet the ball of his foot was throbbing with a dull ache; he reckoned the skin on the bottom had been soaked raw, or perhaps he had rubbed up blisters.

Old Cai is thirty-seven. He came to Beijing from his rural home in Gansu and has been a delivery rider for four years now. As a Meituan Le Pao rider, tall buildings with no lifts and residential estates that ban e-bikes – all these “crap orders” – fell to him, sloshing around in his soaked socks and shoes. Poor visibility in the rain, awkward phone use, slippery roads – all of it made each delivery harder. To avoid late-delivery penalties, he had to concentrate even more. Whatever was going on inside his shoes simply could not wait; he just kept running through the whole day.

“So you ran for twelve hours just putting up with that?” I asked the next time we met.

Old Cai replied with a mix of bitterness and pride: “Fourteen and a half hours, actually. I get online at ten every day. After I spoke to you yesterday, I did not finish until half past one in the morning.”

I was rather taken aback. What kind of person orders takeout that late on a rainy night? Old Cai looked at me as though I had said something rather odd, took a drag of his cigarette and answered, “So what? It happens all the time. The other day I delivered as late as two in the morning – someone even ordered bubble tea.”

Little Tan, a dedicated delivery rider for Ele.me, thought I was making a fuss about nothing, too. Born in 2000, Tan had only come to Beijing from his home in Henan last year. He described himself with the old saying, “One person’s full belly keeps the whole family from hunger.” Compared with Old Cai, his life was a little less burdened and he carried himself more lightly, but even he had to turn up and run orders every time it rained.

He reckoned soaking from head to foot was just part of the job on a rainy day. Even when it was not raining, during Beijing’s scorching summers, sprinting all over the city produced enough sweat to soak through every layer of clothes you had on.

On 12 August a sudden downpour hit Beijing while Tan was heading back to his delivery zone. The cheap raincoat he had bought for twenty yuan tore a gash mid-delivery, and with the wind raging, it did not take long before the rain had soaked him to the bone. So he simply took the raincoat off and kept riding.

“I can put up with all of that,” Tan said. What he could not stand was that all he had had for breakfast was a bowl of congee, and he had expected to grab lunch a few hours later. Instead, he ran all the way until eight at night. The sudden downpour sent hundreds – perhaps thousands – of customers grabbing their phones to order takeout at the same moment, and Tan’s app just kept chiming, “You have a new order.” The order surge gave him no chance to stop. He just kept weaving through wind and rain. By the time he went offline, his power bank was completely drained and his phone had four per cent battery left. He bought a meal intending to eat it at home, but he was so ravenous he could not wait – he had to pull up at a bus stop on the roadside.

He took off his blue helmet, set it aside, and raindrops still dripped from his face into his food, yet it did not seem to bother him in the slightest. Tan sat by the advertising board and ate in plain silence. Before long he put his blue helmet back on – the whole motion one seamless stroke – swung up onto the e-bike that was his constant companion, and disappeared into Beijing’s long night, as though he had never stopped there at all.

I passed these freshly heard stories on to Old Wei, who received them rather unflappably. Old Wei is from Shandong, forty-three years old, and now does deliveries for JD. He had actually been working in the delivery industry since 2018. Looking back over all those years, he felt that a bit of hardship and the odd injury were perfectly normal in this line of work. What truly unsettled him these past few days was the fact that, despite every effort to speed up and make sure meals reached customers on time in the rain, he still received complaints out of nowhere.

II. The Worse the Weather, the More You Must Run Orders

Old Cai held up a single finger to me. I stared at his index finger and asked: “Does that mean you ran for one day, or rested for one day?”

“Didn’t get a single day off.” He laughed. “Don’t say ‘these last couple of days’ – I’ve been running deliveries for four years now, and apart from the Spring Festival or something that absolutely can’t wait, I never take a break.”

Old Cai, sandwiched between elderly parents and young children, is the pillar of his family. His elder child sat the zhongkao – the national exam determining entry to senior high school – this year. Because the results were less than ideal, come September the kid can only attend a private senior high school, and the tuition alone runs to forty or fifty thousand yuan a year.

“The kids are growing up, and education costs money – you tell me, do you think I’m not under pressure? Working like this fourteen or fifteen hours a day, I earn maybe thirteen or fourteen thousand a month, and in the end there’s barely anything left over.”

Yet family has never been only a reason to exhaust himself on the road; it also tightens the mental tether that keeps him protecting himself while speeding through traffic. He said his absolute bottom line is staying out of accidents. If something happens, not only does it hold up his deliveries – he has a wife and children waiting at home, after all.

For a delivery rider, personal safety and the money that sustains a family carry equal weight, yet they pull in opposite directions. Still, there was a note of confidence in Old Cai’s voice: he believed his skill at riding could keep him balanced between the two.

Once, the platform fired off a dozen-plus orders all at once. He had to figure out the fastest delivery route on the fly while, at high speed, watching the pace of surrounding vehicles and the behaviour of their drivers, calculating whether it would be “safe” enough to ride against traffic or jump a red light.

When he had to run an order into a residential estate that banned e-bikes – meaning he had to deliver on foot – and the subsequent orders in his queue were about to breach their time limits, he would sprint back to his bike, drenched in sweat, only to light a cigarette first. He said: “The more urgent things get, the more I must keep my head clear. Running deliveries is not just a matter of physical endurance – you have to be crunching numbers in your head the entire time.”

This is dancing on the edge of a knife, through and through. At first glance, the pressure driving Old Cai to run orders rain or shine seems to come entirely from his family, but that may be only half the truth.

Under the management systems of platforms like Meituan and Ele.me, the room left for a rider to “dance on the edge of a knife” is actually rather narrow. That knife edge appears to be one riders choose to stand on of their own accord, but sometimes it is not a voluntary choice, and it is not something you can simply decide to walk away from.

First, Old Cai points out that Meituan set up Le Pao riders precisely to address the shortfall in rider numbers during extreme weather such as heatwaves, torrential rain, strong winds and snowfall. “The orders others refuse to deliver, we deliver. Some younger riders don’t carry the pressure we do – when it rains, they don’t want to come out, and the team captain forces them online anyway.”

Ele.me Youxuan, the mirror counterpart to Meituan Le Pao, operates under the same rules. Ele.me Youxuan rider Xiao Wang explains: “Nowadays the crowdsourced delivery on both Meituan and Ele.me isn’t as free as it used to be. Runners like us on Youxuan have more guaranteed order volume than regular crowdsourced riders. But miss a few rainy days and the team captain will kick you off the squad.”

By contrast, Ele.me Dedicated Delivery relies on fines to manage attendance in bad weather. Tan grumbled: “The per-order rate on Dedicated Delivery is a bit higher than crowdsourced delivery, but the worse the weather gets, the more you have to come out and run orders. Right now, with gentle breeze and bright sunshine, we can actually take a day off.”

One time, when he headed out, rainwater was already covering the wheels of his e-bike. By the time he reached the road, standing water was up to the traffic police officers’ knees. But he had no choice. He had tried making excuses to take a day off: “The only two excuses you can offer are that your e-bike broke down or your phone broke down – and do you really think the station manager wouldn’t see through that? Our order volume determines the station manager’s wages. And since the food delivery wars kicked off, riders have been in short supply. Fewer riders showing up, and delivery efficiency to customers suffers, guaranteed.” Tan revealed that when a station manager truly pushes back, they will fine riders – anything from 300 to 500 yuan – and post the fine notice straight into the group chat, killing the chicken to frighten the monkey.

Secondly, attendance requirements force riders to run orders in bad weather whether they want to or not. On both Meituan and Ele.me, the platform permits one day of rest per week, but if you exceed the allowed days off, you forfeit your “attendance bonus”. Yet Old Cai, Tan, and Wang all understood that saying “forfeiting the bonus” was, in reality, just a roundabout way of saying “fine”. “That’s money we’ve earned. Lose the bonus and it’s a yuan less per order, which adds up to hundreds or even a thousand yuan over a month. I’d never dare take a day off lightly – if it’s raining and there’s nothing urgent, you just go out and run. Otherwise, when something does come up, you won’t be able to take the time off.”

Beyond losing the “attendance bonus”, another thing that makes life miserable for riders on Meituan Le Pao or Ele.me Youxuan is that on rainy days the orders pile up one on top of another, endless and unbroken. If a rider wants to hand back orders in hand and take a breather, they are instead charged a fee by the platform. “For up to four orders, each one you pass on costs two yuan; above four, it’s three yuan, then five, then seven – the charging is tiered, too,” Wang explained.

If we accept the reality that delivery riders have no choice but to keep working in extreme weather conditions, then who bears the cost of what they sacrifice for doing so?

A week had passed since that rainy night. When I reached Old Cai again, he was at the hospital getting checked over. The night before, a heavy downpour had left the roads slick, and with condensation fogging up his helmet visor and blocking his view, he had rear-ended a car while delivering and was thrown over the handlebars.

When I heard the news, for a moment I couldn’t take it in. I could hardly believe the accident had come so soon – Old Cai’s breezy tone when he talked about “dancing on the edge of a knife” still rang in my ears. But reality is cruel and dangerous, and not quite the casual brush-off he made it sound.

When I asked Old Cai and Tan whether delivery riders received any corresponding allowance for working in dangerous conditions such as rain or extreme heat, the answer was “having one or not amounts to the same thing”. On rainy days, because fewer riders are on shift, the per-order rate fluctuates slightly according to shifts in supply and demand between order volume and available riders – but there is no allowance specifically designated for rain. Beyond that, whether it is small costs like raincoats, helmets, and work uniforms, or larger ones like damage to a phone or e-bike, riders bear all these expenses or losses out of their own pockets.

Both Old Cai and Tan independently mentioned incidents in which their phones had been flooded after hours of delivering in the rain. Old Cai, who is always frugal, had no option but to pay out of his own pocket for a new phone. Tan quipped that one rainy day he earned 400 yuan but spent 450 yuan replacing a phone screen – a whole day scrambling through the rain, and he ended up 50 yuan out of pocket.

When the subject turned to the heat allowance, Old Cai found it absurd. This year, Beijing’s standard for paying heat allowances to outdoor workers is no less than 180 yuan per person per month. Meituan, too, launched its “2025 Summer Cool Campaign” this season, claiming to “increase riders’ earnings in hot weather through more targeted and diverse approaches, such as per-order bonuses and long-term campaigns.”

But in Old Cai’s actual experience, what the so-called “per-order bonus” and “targeted” really mean is this: Meituan does not disburse the heat allowance as a monthly lump sum. Instead, riders must complete a minimum number of deliveries each day between 1:30 pm and 5:00 pm. Zero to four orders: no bonus. Four to twelve orders: one yuan per order. More than twelve orders: three yuan per order.

Anyone who has run deliveries knows that the window between 1:30 pm and 5:00 pm falls between the lunchtime and evening peaks, when order volume is at its lowest – hitting a KPI like that is no easy feat. And that very time slot is also the hottest part of the day, with temperatures often climbing above 35 degrees Celsius. And so, under the banner of “precision,” a heat allowance that is supposed to acknowledge riders’ toil has instead become a lever the platform uses to push them out into the sweltering heat.

Tan, for his part, had never heard of any “heat allowance.” When I asked what he would like the platform to improve, he laughed and said: “At least provide some Huoxiang Zhengqi oral liquid – a traditional herbal remedy for heat stroke – or something like that.”

Last summer, he suffered heat stroke for the first time while running orders. All he felt was dizziness, a ringing in his ears, and a dreadful nausea; he vomited up bitter fluid but stubbornly finished delivering the order. It was only after he bought some Huoxiang Zhengqi oral liquid at a pharmacy that he felt a little better. “From then on, I learnt my lesson,” he said. “You must always keep some on hand in summer.”

On these issues, Old Wei – a JD rider – sounded considerably more at ease. Because, as he explained, JD pays a genuine 300-yuan monthly heat allowance to full-time riders, and that one actually arrives. Perks such as cooling arm sleeves and Huoxiang Zhengqi oral liquid are also available to riders free of charge.

Old Wei spoke candidly about hoping JD would keep improving and sustain this standard of benefits. Yet a trace of worry crept into his tone, because he knew that some of these perks depended not on riders but on the platform’s commercial calculations. Just a few months ago, when JD Delivery first launched and was trying to attract riders, the per-order rate stood at 10 yuan. Now it has dropped to around 4.

As Old Wei spoke, I recalled a woman who had once told me about the “food delivery wars” a decade ago. In the summer of 2015, before Baidu Waimai and Dianping had been swallowed up by Ele.me and Meituan, riders’ combined monthly allowances for rain, long-distance deliveries and heat could add up to more than 2,000 yuan. Once the market had been monopolised, those allowances more or less vanished. In this latest round of the “three-way war,” while the platforms still compete, the subsidies flow overwhelmingly to customers rather than to riders. With the labour market for delivery work already saturated, the platforms no longer need to woo riders to capture market share and traffic; they would rather spend that money absorbing the waste cost of mountains of bubble tea than boost riders’ benefits.

In truth, from a small bottle of Huoxiang Zhengqi oral liquid and a pair of cooling arm sleeves, to a tangible rain or heat allowance, to more reasonable delivery time windows in bad weather – these granular changes, however small, can always give riders more dignity, better health and a little more comfort in the way they work and live. And yes – they have not even mentioned social insurance. In any case, this summer is already over, and their voices remain drowned out by torrential rain or heatwaves. So will change come next summer, or every summer to follow? The answer does not seem to be entirely in their hands.