A Debate on Whether to Order Takeaway on Stormy Days

The bitter summer is almost at an end, but the autumn rains may chill to the bone just the same.

This year’s summer was anything but ordinary. Extreme rainfall and scorching heat swept across the country in quick succession: surface temperatures in Shaanxi peaked at 72.9°C; in Harbin, in the northeast, air-conditioner installations surged; and in Beijing, a downpour dumped a full year’s rainfall in just four days.

Whenever the rain pours down outside the window, turning the world into a white blur, a thought perhaps crosses everyone’s mind: rain is fair, falling equally on every person in this world. Yet we forget that Lao She, in Rickshaw Boy, acknowledged: “In truth, rain is far from fair, for it falls upon a world that knows no fairness.”

Not long ago, Nature Cities published an article examining how consumers shift their exposure risk to delivery riders during extreme weather. Rather than drawing any novel conclusion, it laid bare—in the guise of “science”—a truth that people generally sense but would rather not face.

Foodthink subsequently, in Commercial Battles in the Downpour: Delivery Riders’ Bitter Summer, recorded the hidden struggles of several delivery riders in severe weather—struggles invisible to outsiders—yet it sparked an unexpectedly heated debate in the comments over whether to order takeaway on stormy days.

In the comments section of another Foodthink article, “Is Delivering Food a Form of ‘Life-Shortening’ Labour?”, a debate also erupted over whether anyone should care about whether riders eat well enough. Unfortunately, the article has since been deleted for breaching some regulation whose nature remains unknown.

As one internet user pointed out, similar topics have been debated for years—even a decade ago there were several rounds—yet the conversation always seems to end up in a binary dead end: “Order delivery—yes, the rider gets soaked, but they earn money” versus “Don’t order delivery—the rider stays dry, but they lose their livelihood.”

@gogo: One midday on a weekday I drove to a bank to run an errand. The sun was so fierce the tarmac felt ready to catch fire. Sitting in the car, I noticed that at that hour the only humans still sprinting across open ground seemed to be delivery riders.

@Roo: Why do so many people refuse to believe that riders simply don’t want to take orders in terrible weather—even if that feeling is only a tiny sliver buried deep beneath the pressure of making a living? In truth, everyone longs for work with more dignity; it’s just been crushed out of them.

@衣襟溶绿: I just want to know—on a hot day, a cold day, a rainy day: should you order takeaway or not? If nobody does, do riders have any income at all?

@俞黛眉: As I read it, the point of this article is that the extra income riders earn working in extreme weather is nowhere near worth the suffering they endure. Most importantly, working in such conditions is coerced—riders have no way to avoid it.

@木匠锯子: Then if you don’t order takeaway in bad weather, who’s going to pay the riders? That’s rather like refusing to eat in case you choke.

@寺: Have you actually read the article? When it’s pouring and the water is knee-deep, what rider wants to risk their life for a few hundred yuan?

@HE (delivery rider): Last year, when it rained, the water rose so high. I thought I’d play hooky and decided not to go out. No sooner had I sat down than the station manager posted notices in the group chat about fines issued to others. A single——day absence meant 500 yuan docked, which is what I earn in a day and a half. Panicked, I rushed back out. If there’d been a pothole, if a manhole cover had floated up on the road, it would truly have been the end of me. Oh, and the last time I asked the station manager for leave, my excuse was taking my wife to a hospital check-up—when in reality I haven’t even got married yet. You really just do whatever it takes.

@慎独君: In truth, it’s life that drives them—forced to push forward through extreme weather at the peril of their lives. If they could afford a day’s rest, they’d all be home the moment the weather turned.

@Jane田秀珍: People who deliver other people’s meals to earn a living are grateful just to get one themselves—who’s thinking about whether it’s nutritious? They dart through traffic, they shout and curse in lifts. Many of these young riders run and earn with everything they’ve got; everything else is beside the point.

@Anonymous (delivery rider): Still young, but I’m already getting those little heart palpitations from the grind. I took consecutive days off to cut out the high-intensity runs. Guess what happened that month? Almost no food. So you’ve got to keep working—if you don’t, you go hungry. You’ve got to push harder, but what did your body ever do to deserve this?

@IKe: This is a “why don’t they eat meat porridge” kind of study. Irregular meals keep you going for decades, I suppose, but eat on a schedule and the orders dry up—you’d starve within two days. Does anyone not know that eating regularly is good for you? Is that really the point?

@英冠球队爱华顿: “Eat on a schedule and you’ll starve”—now that’s a bold claim. Have you ever done a delivery yourself? What’s wrong with telling riders to look after their health? If you’re going in with misconceptions, don’t come out here muddying the waters for everyone else.

@暴躁的阿磐 (delivery rider): Delivering food is, in essence, a process of earning money with your life. I’ve been in this industry for eight years. At first, like some of the new recruits today, I’d eat on schedule—even if that meant delaying a meal by an hour or two. But over time my eating habits changed. I started relying on whatever was quick to eat and wouldn’t hold me up when an order suddenly landed. For a stretch, I even bought military compressed biscuits and would pull one out to take a couple of bites at a red light. Eventually I stopped eating altogether to save time—and to avoid the toilet. Everyone knows that once you eat, you risk needing the loo, and for a rider, if there’s a choice, you’d rather not go. Even the simplest stop for a wee could mean missing one or two golden orders.

@Wie (delivery rider): What the article describes resonated deeply with me. I hope the state and the platforms will improve policies so that our working conditions keep getting better. Discus sion Two: Unity or Confrontation? Today’s Consumers, Tomorrow’s Workers

Faced with the suffering riders endure in extreme weather, there are two camps. One group argues that workers earn a living by delivering food while consumers simply pay to meet their own needs—and many of those consumers are working people too, with legitimate reasons to order takeaway when they’re swamped at work. They shouldn’t be made to carry a moral burden for that. The other group insists that workers’ safety and dignity must be protected, and precisely because consumers are also working people, they ought to stand in solidarity and look out for one another. Some haven’t even been drawn into the debate at all; they’ve simply expressed direct concern for riders’ injuries. Others have reached out with empathy by recalling their own or a family member’s experience of delivering food.

@资深食瓜群众: Most “people” who order takeaway in storms, blizzards or gales have no conscience.

@Aogu Kailin: People who go to the hospital in the dead of night have no conscience either—they’re disturbing the doctors’ rest! People who shop online for Singles’ Day have no conscience—they keep the couriers running round the clock with no break at all! People who dial 110 or 119 when danger strikes have no conscience—they put innocent police officers and firefighters at mortal risk and make them suffer!

@我只是想扫一下: To weigh the safety of human lives against whether you can get a takeaway on a stormy day—how truly noble.

@Aogu Kailin: If you say delivery in a downpour carries a potential risk, do you think that risk is imposed by consumers or by the platforms? Did consumers set the delivery deadlines and the reward-and-penalty systems? Do consumers have any say in those decisions? Does riders’ pressure come from the orders themselves or from the platforms? Why is everyone condemning consumers instead of indicting the capitalists counting their money in the office?

@我只是想扫一下: On a day of torrential rain, “well, even if I don’t order, someone else will”—is that the mentality? As an adult, is it really so hard to cook for yourself, nip down to the little restaurant on the ground floor, or make do with a pot of instant noodles?

@Clémence: This is really just the sophistry of a privileged mindset. The real question isn’t “can you order takeaway”—it’s this: knowing full well that riders are out there delivering through typhoons and downpours, are you willing to rein in your own fingers and avoid letting someone else take a risk on your behalf in these extreme conditions? Pushing for platform reform is of course important, but before that, every consumer can at least refrain from adding to a rider’s risk burden at the most dangerous moments. That is the bare minimum of empathy and restraint.

@momo: Ordinary consumers shouldn’t let themselves be guilt-tripped. Just get on with your life. I go to work every day and suffer plenty—does anyone worry about me? You’ve got to place an order for riders to earn anything. If you don’t want to do it, then don’t—nobody forced you. Go be a factory worker if you like, you lot with no sun and no rain to deal with. Who doesn’t find work a grind?

@福团: Is it really so hard to treat yourself as a person and other people as people too? Here we go again with the logic that those at the bottom must prey on one another. Being able to empathise, to show compassion, to hold moral standards—that’s what being a decent human being actually requires.

@momo: I can’t even treat myself as a human being and refuse 996, so how can I possibly treat others as human beings and spend all that energy on them? Is that really so hard to understand? You great saints can’t bear to see riders out in a downpour—so why can you bear to watch us do 996 and go hungry?

@福团: It is precisely people like you who give a poisonous logic the soil to take root, who have built up this chain of callous indifference link by link. All I can say is you deserve a lifetime of 996, because you don’t merit a better life or kinder treatment. Every right working people have fought for today would be like throwing a meat bun at a dog if it fell into your hands.

@momo: If you truly had a conscience, you’d campaign for the platforms to change their rules instead of guilt-tripping ordinary consumers. I’m an ordinary person scrambling to make a living; I don’t have spare energy or goodwill left to figure out which days I should skip ordering takeaway.

@寺: The heavy rain being discussed here obviously isn’t your average shower. In Guangdong terms, we’re talking typhoon season, torrential downpours—are you saying people insist on ordering takeaway during a typhoon? Back when there were no delivery platforms, people got by just fine. How has encouraging people not to order takeaway during a typhoon turned into “working people taking the blame”?

@等石灰石: There’s someone in the comments working very hard to defend ordering takeaway on stormy and scorching days. Consumers of course shouldn’t be blamed, but the defence shouldn’t consist of dismissing riders’ predicament, without a shred of solidarity with people at the bottom. All they manage to say is, “I work hard too—why doesn’t anyone feel sorry for me?”

@KNT: Ordering takeaway is a legal right; consumers shouldn’t be condemned. If riders are injured during work, that’s primarily due to the platforms and their systems. At most you can encourage empathy when ordering in unusual conditions, but that’s not an obligation. Condemning consumers is pure agenda-driving and a fundamentally misguided framing.

@Roo: I understand that no one’s life is easy. But if we all reduce ourselves to the pure role of consumer, treating other people’s labour as nothing more than a service to fulfil our own needs, and lack the most basic human-to-human empathy towards workers, then does any truly dignified labour even exist in this world? Just think: if someone were to treat you or your family as nothing more than a service tool for meeting some need of theirs—how would that feel? And to those who always say we should condemn capital and the algorithms—please think seriously: if consumers view themselves and other workers with exactly the same coldness as capital views workers, on what grounds do we imagine we have any power to change anything?

@Waiting: When we buy things or order takeaway, shouldn’t we assume as a default that the goods and services we receive are not produced by people being ground down and made to suffer? Why has it become the default that workers can be exploited, and then consumers are asked to spend extra energy and cost just to make the right choice? Delivery platforms push risk, cost and moral pressure down layer after layer, all landing on the riders at the very end of the line and on consumers. The platform pockets the profit, but workers are made to trade their lives for cash, and consumers are made to feel guilty. Whether a handful of people order takeaway or not doesn’t affect how the whole system runs. What actually helps is riders organising a union, banding together to sue the platforms for labour-law violations, and pushing for the drafting and enforcement of industry protection laws for riders.

@蟲: Ask why the people ordering food no longer have time to cook and must resort to takeaway. Capital is a sugarcane stalk with sweetness at every end: the working hours of the beasts of burden in office cubicles are stretched longer, and out of that grow the camels who deliver the meals.

@梅诗金公爵: In an economic climate that feels like a Great Depression, it isn’t just capital growing ever more ruthless—even ordinary people are becoming increasingly hostile. How can so many people genuinely make life harder for riders who brave wind and rain just to earn a few yuan a delivery? Humanity really ought to cultivate a greater sense of empathy and compassion. We are all human. If we don’t stand together to resist capital and its algorithms, these ill effects will sooner or later come back to weigh on us all.

@昆虫海岛: Not long ago the DingTalk CEO discovered at dawn that hardly anyone was in the office and berated everyone for leaving early. That incident is moving to think about too. We are all the same beasts of burden, struggling the same way—and being able to deliver food in a first-tier city, or work in the internet sector, already counts as relatively high pay. Many more people’s suffering is invisible, and their pain can’t buy them enough money or attention. Having a job these days is already eating shit, and there are even hungrier people scrambling to grab a bite of it. Who is actually living the good life?

@多吃肉蛋奶: One summer my younger brother went to do delivery work. He was visibly worn down and exhausted. He told me the platforms are incredibly harsh—that despite earning some money, he feels like the blood is being slowly drained out of him.

@野鼠芭比: I did a few days of delivering, back in early summer before it got properly hot, and I still broke out in heat rash on my backside—sore and itchy, and it took ages to clear. It was really miserable. Everyone has a hard time of it. There are more and more women doing delivery now. Because of how women’s reproductive systems work, we’re more prone to infection, and when toilets aren’t easily accessible, inflammation sets in quickly. I truly wish we were all just naturally immune to the heat and the cold. Once I was delivering against the wind and rain, turned up one minute late, and had 70% of the fee docked! It was past eleven at night. The customer hadn’t written the address properly and wouldn’t answer the phone. I filed an appeal and lost. I nearly saw red.

@evak2040: Like me, my brother can’t sit still and always finds something to keep busy. Last summer he went to do deliveries. The exhaustion combined with a cold and altitude sickness triggered a pneumothorax—he had lung surgery a while back.

@厌翩浊: Just a reminder—Huoxiang Zhengqi Liquid only has a limited effect when heatstroke isn’t severe. With this kind of climate, if you actually get heatstroke, please go to hospital. Keep two extra bottles of cold water and ice packs in your insulated box.

@法外葡挞: The parts of your skin that have turned white from soaking, especially when they stay wet for long periods without ventilation, are highly prone to bacterial or fungal infection. You could try applying some Erythromycin Eye Ointment and switch to more breathable footwear. If the OP has a way of getting in touch, could you let Old Cai in the article know about this?

Discus sion Three: Has the Cost Really Been Transferred?

When we discuss “ordering takeaway on a stormy day”—a topic that seems to protect consumers’ interests—we must press further: has the cost really been transferred, or does it simply keep circulating through this dangerous system? Merchants facing steep platform commissions, unhealthy cheap food, and the various road accidents caused by riders—these consequences can still find their way back to every one of us in one form or another.

@理查德帕克: When delivery riders are being forced to bear such an enormous physical load, something will inevitably come back to hit consumers over a longer span of time. None of us is truly outside this system.

@轻松熊嗷: Platforms squeezing delivery times really has done a lot of people harm. Not only are riders’ own safety left unprotected—the likelihood of a traffic accident caused by rushed riding goes up dramatically, and ordinary people can get hurt too. I’m always scared when riding my little e-bike because of delivery riders. They ride so fast, ignore traffic lights, check their phones while cycling, and come shooting out of every kind of blind spot.

@青扬: I once saw the Sam’s Club delivery riders in Beijing—seven or eight, sometimes more, enormous shopping bags stuffed with goods, whole cases of milk, rice, flour and oil lashed to the front, back, left and right of their e-bikes, speeding down the carriageways of the city ring roads or squeezing through the narrow, cramped lanes of old housing estates. It is extraordinarily inconvenient and unsafe. In many cities e-bikes have no dedicated lane, posing a hazard to pedestrians, motorists and the riders themselves. So running a delivery service in storms or blizzards is simply inhumane. It is no different from Li Shande hauling lychees or the Linyi slave running himself to death in Chang’an Lychees. This round of platform warfare has squeezed delivery riders and small shopkeepers into the tiniest margin for survival, defying both economic logic and the laws of nature—it will be very hard not to be resisted—but who will bear the cost?

@Yi: Yesterday I listened to a business podcast about the delivery wars, and all I heard about was fulfilment cost and user mindshare. JD.com’s Q2 results just dropped—the new-business segment represented by JD Delivery saw revenue surge but profits plummet, and investors aren’t buying it. The cash these platforms are burning is staggering, and they spare no effort in the propaganda war. Delivery riders in this battle are little more than ammunition and expendable stock, while the mountains of single-use packaging and wasted milk tea are the scars the planet is made to wear on their behalf.

@Roo: I’ve seen people say that as long as the consumer pays, there’s nothing wrong with ordering milk tea at two in the morning. But could it be that rather than agonising over what happens to delivery riders, consumers should first consider what drinking bubble tea at 2 a.m. does to their own health? Discussion Four: Are Platform gig workers our escape route?

According to the 2024 Gig Economy Interpretation Report, China’s flexible-employment population surpassed 265 million in 2024, of which 175 million are platform-based gig workers. The gig economy is really a prism reflecting the broader state of the economy—anyone who loses a job could slip into it. In that sense, worrying about the working conditions of delivery riders, ride-hailing drivers and other gig workers may well be a way of looking after ourselves. Are platform gig workers our “escape route”? Can we, as workers, have a more dignified future?

@闸蟹大拿: This is the fallback life the Douyin kids mean when they say, “If it doesn’t work out, I’ll just go do deliveries.”

@阿梅奥耶: Delivery, courier work, designated-driver service, ride-hailing, freight—the lot of them are the same, trapped by platforms and bled dry. Take DiDi: sometimes a customer places a normal real-time order, but by the time it reaches the driver it has been passed through several hands and turned into a fixed-price job. There have been cases where a user paid 100 yuan but the driver only got 50—a commission rate as high as 50%.

@刍狗: When I was moving out at graduation, I spent a long time chatting with a Blue Rhino driver in the van. I was stunned—no matter when I booked a move, a driver would accept the order and contact me within seconds. I assumed that was just market demand, but he told me the system forcibly assigns jobs to drivers and they must phone the customer within three minutes of accepting, or face a performance deduction. That morning was sweltering; by early afternoon a torrential downpour set in. He’d already completed two jobs—moving work is grueling—and then he was force-assigned mine, so his plan to go back to his dorm and rest was ruined. He told me himself: a mover like him earns 8,000 yuan a month, pays 900 to share a dorm in Beijing, the platform takes 20%, and after living expenses he’s left with just 4,000 in net income. And that’s during graduation season, when moving demand hits its annual peak.

@沉默是金: The platforms relentlessly squeeze prices downward, from seven or eight yuan per order at first to two or three yuan now. All they provide is a single platform, and they skim commission off riders, merchants and customers alike. If the average fee per order could go up, riders wouldn’t need to run so many orders each day. They’d have time to choose: to rest, to have a life, to look after their family. But in reality, you rarely get both.

@茶餐廳老娘: Don’t think of delivery work as a safety net. The fewer people who do it, the more the wages and conditions for those who remain will improve and the less exploitation there will be. I once saw a rider’s jacket so faded by the sun that the yellow Meituan uniform had turned white—and it was torn. A lot of riders don’t look particularly healthy.

@tree: There’s a trend of everyone turning to delivery work now—even young women are joining the ranks. You can gauge the state of the economy from that alone. However dire conditions get, riders are still in short supply.

@momo: The problem isn’t those at the bottom preying on one another—yes, that exists, but it is absolutely not the point. That a platform system with this many issues ends up being framed as the sole fault of individuals at the bottom is utterly unreasonable. As long as the algorithms don’t change, nobody caught inside them gets a moment’s peace.

@哥伦布的蛋: I used to think, so what if I get laid off—worst case I’ll just go do deliveries. After reading this article I know for sure I couldn’t stomach that kind of hardship. I’ll just muddle through another day while I can.

@_littleshuh: Meanwhile, the worst, most revolting ad of the year has appeared: in a spacious, luxurious room, an elite guy raises a champagne flute and says, “When the lads get together for a meal, I choose Meituan.” The shot cuts to a row of grinning delivery riders, holding up their bags with both hands: “Because Meituan is faster, more…” Then the scene switches to a bunch of old farts in waistcoats lounging on sofas, sitting on tables, enjoying themselves. I genuinely cannot fathom what Meituan’s brand and PR teams are thinking. Are their heads full of dung, or are they doing it on purpose, waiting for it to ferment so they can get back at their boss?

@啥啥: As a child I read Ye Yonglie’s Lingtong’s Trip to the Future World. There was a passage describing how people ate in the future: you press a button at home, and a steaming hot meal slides out of a little hatch in the wall. I could never have imagined that those lovely aspirations from the book would, in the end, be realised through the cheapening of society’s human labour—its sweat and blood made disposable.

Editor: Yu Yang