Fresh Grocery Sorters Racing the Algorithm

Yuyang: Does this suggest that picking is an incredibly high-pressure job?

He Siqi: I think that was a consideration. Their initial concern was that I wouldn’t be able to persevere, because there’s nothing else to it—it’s just exhausting.

Tianle: How many pickers like you were there?

He Siqi: There were probably about 20 people in the work WeChat group, but there’s a high turnover rate among pickers. For example, on my first day of trials, a man asked me, “Are you new?” When I said yes, he just kept smiling at me. A couple of days later, he was gone.

II. 30,000 Steps a Day

He Siqi: I didn’t track my steps on WeChat at the time, but my colleagues all said they did 30,000 steps a day. Running was the norm for about two-thirds of our time; during the other third, which isn’t a peak period, we can sit and rest. But once the peak hits, we have to start running. For example, one day the supervisor posted a message in the group saying that in other stores, pickers had already knocked over elderly customers, so we had to be careful not to collide with customers while picking. Because the layout of 7Fresh stores has the supermarket at the front and the warehouse at the back, many of our items need to be picked from the shop floor. So, when it’s crowded, we still have to run. Our biggest headache is the 8 o’clock discounts; many elderly people come to wait for discounted goods, and we can’t get through.

Tianle: How large are the supermarket and warehouse areas? How do you decide whether to get items from the shop floor or the back warehouse? Is there some equipment that tells you?

He Siqi: The supermarket area is about 200 square metres. It’s not large, but you have to run everywhere because the shop floor is divided into fruit and vegetable and meat sections, and you have to keep circling. The orders we hate most are the ones that require items from both the front and the back. As pickers, we have a few tools; the primary one is the PDA, which is that handheld device similar to a smartphone. We get the customers’ order information through this device, which shows whether the product is located in the front or the back.

Yuyang: Pacing back and forth is exhausting. I’ve worked in courier services before, and the space there is often even tighter; even if you aren’t running, just walking back and forth is enough to make your feet give out. So, how did you feel after your first day? Did you just crash the moment you got home?

He Siqi: There was a bit of novelty on the first day because a mentor let me use his device, so it didn’t matter if I went overtime. There was even a small sense of achievement, as if I’d mastered a new skill. But on the other hand, my feet were in absolute agony, and I was indeed exhausted when I got home.

Yuyang: So, the “30-minute delivery” promised by fresh grocery platforms like Xiaoxiang and Dingdong is actually the result of pickers and delivery riders working in tandem. Once a customer places an order, how much time are you given to pick the items?

He Siqi: Normally, it’s nine minutes per order. It doesn’t matter how many items are in there—whether it’s just a single bird’s eye chilli or two crates of mineral water and four or five watermelons, it’s still nine minutes. But these nine minutes aren’t fixed. When the system dispatches the order, it allocates nine minutes, but if no one accepts it, the clock keeps ticking. By the time I accept it, there might only be five minutes left, so I have to complete the picking within those five minutes.

He Siqi: There are two types of pickers: part-time and full-time. Part-timers are paid per order—1.85 yuan per bag, regardless of whether it contains one item or twenty. Full-timers, however, are paid per item. For example, if an order only has one item, I only get 30 paise. The system dispatches the large orders to the part-timers because they only get 1.85 yuan regardless of the item count, while the small orders are sent to us full-timers. Sometimes, I spend an entire afternoon handling nothing but these single-item small orders. At first, I felt there was something fishy going on; later, when I sought clarification, the supervisor admitted that the system was intentionally designed to dispatch orders this way.

Tianle: The PDA effectively locks the employee’s time. It’s a way for the grocery platforms to force workers to be more efficient. Normal supermarket staff, by comparison, aren’t nearly as stressed as pickers.

Yuyang: Do you think it would be fairer to calculate the order fee based on weight? After all, lugging heavy items back and forth is much more tiring.

He Siqi: I think weight should count for something. We often get orders for 5-litre bottles of mineral water or a 24-bottle crate of Wahaha; they’re a pain for me to move and a pain for the riders to carry. Whenever we get those orders, we always let out a curse.

Tianle: Are you forced to accept orders like Didi drivers, or can you bid for them in a rider’s hall like the delivery drivers do?

He Siqi: We can’t bid. We can only accept orders via the PDA gun, and we can’t see how many items are inside until we do. Once an order is finished, a printer produces a receipt, and only then does the system dispatch the next one. Just like with food delivery, we have our “Order Kings” here. If you want to earn more, you need three things: first, “hard soles”—you have to be able to walk; second, a quick mind—you need to remember exactly which bin each product is in so you can plan your route the moment the order arrives; and third, quick hands—you have to pick the item into the crate the instant you reach the bin. Also, you have to be incredibly fast at packing. There’s a world of difference between the packing speed of a newcomer and a seasoned pro. If your hands are fast, your efficiency is high, and so is your daily order count.

Yuyang: Roughly how long did it take you to adapt to the pace of the work?

Tianle: Is it even possible to adapt?

He Siqi: Tianle is absolutely right; I never adapted. I just endured it because I had no choice. I only “adapted” once I quit.

Tianle: It’s like Sisyphus pushing the boulder. You’re inevitably exhausted by the end of the day, and then if you get enough rest, you feel like you can do it all again the next morning.

He Siqi: The key issue is that as long as I’m working, I don’t feel that tired, but the moment I stop, the exhaustion hits me all at once. Every night when I get home and sit down for a bit, I feel completely drained; resting actually feels more painful than not resting. I start work at 8 am and usually don’t finish until 9 pm—thirteen hours. I cycle home every day, so I’m back by 9:30. I have one day off a week, but we aren’t allowed to take weekends off.

Tianle: That’s a massive workload. 13 hours times six… that’s an “896” schedule, which is even more intense than 996.

He Siqi: It’s not just 13 times 6. Monday to Friday might be 12 or 13 hours, but on Saturdays and Sundays, they’ll schedule you for 14. In a 12-to-14-hour shift, we can complete 100 to 200 orders. In the 31 days I worked there, I lost about two or three kilograms, because with that level of intensity, your rest time is limited and you can’t eat properly. You often just grab a quick bite and call it a day.

It’s not that there are orders every single minute of the day; we could actually finish the work of a 13-hour shift in eight hours. But to ensure the platform’s capacity, they need people stationed there long-term to guarantee a timely response. Even when it’s quiet, we aren’t allowed to rest. Sometimes in the afternoon when orders are few, the supervisor makes us stand up and tidy the bins. There used to be dedicated stockers for that, but the platform later scrapped that role and made the pickers do it.

Yuyang: Among the various fresh grocery models, the dark store model seems to have the most commercial promise, but it appears this comes at the cost of draconian labour control.

He Siqi: My supervisor shouted at us constantly; he’d call you over to berate you at the drop of a hat. After listening to him rant, my mood for the entire day’s work would be ruined. The supervisor mostly sits in a chair monitoring the data; if one of my orders is about to time out, he starts yelling. Even while I’m picking in the front-end supermarket, I can hear him shouting: “Why is it overtime again! What’s wrong with this order?” The pressure is immense; I’m already stressed because I’m running late, and his urging just makes me panic more. Being singled out for criticism was the most humiliating part.

A few of my colleagues had a high number of customer complaints, which resulted in our supervisor being put into a “penalty box” by the 7Fresh system. The system required them to punish the pickers, one of which was making employees hand-copy the packing guidelines and send photos to the supervisor. At the time, I found it surreal; we were being toyed with like primary school children, completely devoid of dignity, but the reality was that everyone did it. For the pickers, as long as there was no fine, this method was acceptable, but for me personally, it was a huge shock. After that happened, I realised that in this society, within the professional or labour sector, the control capital exerts over us is at its strictest. For us pickers, there is a daily lack of dignity in our working lives.

IV. Another Day of Paying to Work

He Siqi: At the 7Fresh supermarket where I work, pickers are under immense pressure, but so are the front-of-house staff. I knew a lady who gutted fish; she was incredibly stressed. Why? For example, if an online customer requested their fish to be gutted, she had to do it for my order. At the same time, in-store customers were asking her for the same thing, but there were only two people at the fish counter—not nearly enough staff. That’s when she’d start to snap. Once, a customer ordered prawns and requested them to be deveined. It took ages, and because of that, my order timed out. That lady just kept swearing—the kind of swearing you hear and imagine all the time.

Tianle: So, while having seafood gutted is great for the consumer—because I can just get a ready-to-cook fish at home and pop it straight in the pan—it’s not so pleasant at your workplace. Was the deveining service an option on the app, or did the customer add it as a special request?

He Siqi: You can add a note, and if there’s a note, we have to follow it. If you don’t, the customer can complain, which affects the site’s performance metrics.

Tianle: Maybe we should cut this part out, otherwise everyone’s going to start making unreasonable requests.

Yu Yang: Are there fines for complaints?

He Siqi: Yes. For instance, if a customer complains about one of my orders, I might be fined 20 to 30 yuan, even though I might have only earned two or three yuan—or even a few cents—from that order. In my first few days, I often told my colleagues, “Another day of paying to work!” That’s because I kept getting customer complaints.

Tianle: What other kinds of complaints were there?

He Siqi: You asked how those complaints that led to me having to hand-copy the guidelines happened. For example: if an order has six items, we need to scan the barcodes of all six using the PDA for the order to be marked as complete. If I couldn’t find one item, my initial approach was to keep searching, but by the time I found it, the order had timed out. Later, I learned there’s a way to avoid the timeout called “manual entry”. Every item has a code displayed on the PDA; when I can’t find a product, other pickers tell me to just “pass the code”—meaning enter the numerical code manually instead of scanning. The order is then marked as complete. But if a colleague found the item for me later, I’d often forget that the order was originally missing something when I came to pack it. That’s when it’s easy for a customer to complain. To avoid a complaint, I’d have to place a supplementary delivery order myself via the 7Fresh app. For instance, I’d order a bottle of water for myself, keep the water, and have the courier deliver the missing item. Even though I got a bottle of water, the delivery fee effectively came out of my own pocket. That, too, was a day of paying to work.

Yu Yang: That makes me reflect. I’ve worked as a delivery driver, so when I order food and the driver is late, I’m quite understanding because I know what might have happened on the road. But if I order from Xiaoxiang Supermarket and find something missing upon delivery, I just find it baffling. I can’t understand how something could just be missing.

Tianle: It’s strange how empathy works; it’s hard to feel it without firsthand experience.

V. “Entering the Freezer During Your Period”

Tianle: From the worker’s perspective, there’s clearly oppression, but the cash income is decent. Many would argue that if someone has no degree or specific skills, they can at least earn over 10,000 yuan a month by trading their physical labour in a job like this. How do you view that perspective?

He Siqi: Piece-rate pay gives pickers the illusion that the more they work, the more they earn, but in reality, the hours we put in are excessive.

Tianle: Who did you observe doing this work? Despite the high turnover, many people still take these jobs.

He Siqi: Mostly young people around 30; 40 is considered old. There was one man in his 40s from Yangzhou, Jiangsu; he was noticeably slower than the younger staff and struggled more with problem-solving. There might be more women; we have one female colleague who seems to have worked there since the supermarket opened. She’s managed to stick it out because the job provides social security. One characteristic of the women among the pickers is that while they aren’t actually that old, they look much older—likely due to the intensity of the labour.

Then there was a 24-year-old female colleague. She wasn’t very strong, so we’d sometimes team up to pull ice packs from the freezer for packing. I told her to always call me when moving ice. She did the first few times, but once she moved three crates of ice packs on her own—each crate weighing about 10kg. When I asked why she moved such heavy things alone, she said quite nonchalantly: “When you’re working away from home, you have no choice. What else can you do?” That sentence left a deep impression on me; she had a very formidable, resilient character.

Tianle: If a woman is on her period, this kind of work must be truly difficult.

He Siqi: Yes. Sometimes female colleagues have to enter the freezer or the chilled store during their periods, which takes a huge toll on them. Our top order-picker works such long hours that her period has become irregular. It really struck me when I heard that. In reality, the price she pays to process over 200 orders a day, or to earn that much money a month, is enormous.

Under labour laws, if I put in that many hours, I should certainly be earning more than 10,000 yuan. At 7Fresh, pickers and delivery riders work in the same environment, and they share a common trait: if you want to make money, you have to sacrifice a vast amount of time. Every day is a grind, constantly waiting for the algorithm to assign orders.

Yu Yang: Yes, we only see how much they earn in a day, but we don’t see the hardship behind it. We don’t know what happens to the workers after this job—the damage to their health, or what their future career prospects are.

He Siqi: There are no career prospects. We’re just disposables.

VI. 7,500 Plastic Bags Consumed Daily

Yuyang: I’ve heard pickers complaining that they’ve developed calluses on their fingers from rubbing and smoothing out the plastic bags during packing. Roughly how many plastic bags do you go through in a day?

He Siqi: My supervisor once posted some data in the work group: at around 3 pm on 26 July, we had processed 1,471 orders. I did the maths, and at that rate, by the time we clocked off at 11:30 pm, we would have hit 2,500 orders or more. If we assume a minimum average of three plastic bags per order, that’s a conservative estimate of 7,500 bags. If there are frozen or chilled items, they also need corresponding thermal bags and one or two ice packs. So, the volume of plastic bags, thermal bags, and ice packs consumed in a single day is quite significant.

Tianle: Also, fruit and vegetables have to be packed in separate plastic boxes, and even drinks are wrapped in a layer of plastic. We often say the biggest problem with plastic packaging isn’t the material itself, but the fact that it’s only used once. Is it possible for 7Fresh to implement a recycling system? For example, once the goods are delivered, the customer takes the items out and leaves the plastic bags or thermal boxes behind; SF Express has started offering this kind of service now.

He Siqi: JD 7Fresh currently doesn’t seem to have any plans for this, but it is something they could do if they wanted to. For instance, if you order online frequently, you could simply hand the plastic or thermal bags from your previous order back to the rider during the next delivery. They could also introduce a policy where the platform grants customers loyalty points for every plastic bag recycled.

Tianle: But there’s a risk for the company there: consumers might not buy into it. Many people are indifferent to environmental protection and wouldn’t want to accept second-hand bags.

VII. E-commerce hits the wet market: what have we lost?

Yuyang: Siqi’s sharing has made the impact of current fresh food e-commerce platforms on wet markets very tangible. The rigid control the platforms exert over pickers seems to have become a weapon used to disrupt the wet market. Tianle, what are your thoughts? Since you’ve always been concerned with how people access food and how to eat well.

Tianle: I’ve been thinking about something lately. In the past, buying things involved a process of interacting with people. Now, many people are reluctant to go to the wet market because they feel every trip is a battle of wits and haggling with the vendors. E-commerce and supermarkets are seen as better because prices are clearly marked, and there’s no fear of being ripped off. But have we considered the working conditions of supermarket staff? Or the workers in e-commerce dark stores? Pickers, stockers, and delivery riders are truly like the physical extensions of a vast system; the human body is merely performing the tasks that the data system cannot, requiring no emotion whatsoever. Unlike the wet market, which is at least a living market—a place for trade and communication, where there is still something human in the interactions.

Today, many young people rely on delivery for meals and doorstep delivery for groceries, leading them to feel that they no longer need to interact with anyone. In reality, this state of existence extends to their relationships with colleagues, family, and even friends. Dealing with people is a form of constant refinement; it certainly has its positives and negatives, but if we stop refining ourselves, we become people who only communicate with machines. I find that state of affairs completely unacceptable.

Yuyang: Beyond that, we aren’t certain if the food provided by e-commerce is any tastier or healthier. I once bought tomatoes from Xiaoxiang Supermarket where the seeds and juice weren’t liquid, but had solidified. The inside of the tomato was hollowed out, and it had no tomato taste at all. I looked it up and found this can be caused by the use of ripening agents. While the exploitation of pickers is already severe, I saw an analysis suggesting that the fulfilment cost for a single order on a fresh food platform, including the pickers’ and riders’ fees, is around 10-13 yuan. Their operational cost pressure remains immense, so is it possible they are cutting costs at the upstream supply level? That is a worrying question.

Tianle: After working as a picker, does Siqi still use these platforms to buy ingredients?

He Siqi: I do, but not often. Actually, I ordered from online platforms the most when I was working as a picker. I became very interested in the products; for example, while picking orders, I’d see all sorts of bread and toast, and since I didn’t have time for breakfast, I’d place an order. Once I stopped being a picker, I rarely ordered online because I had more time to go to supermarkets or wet markets in person.

Personally, if my order arrives a few minutes late, I don’t really mind. But the platforms are obsessed with data; they must guarantee delivery within a specified time. To maintain this image of corporate efficiency, they push that accountability strictly from the top down, and ultimately, it manifests in the daily labour of us pickers.

Yuyang: Exactly, it’s the insistence that an order must be delivered within 30 minutes no matter what. Delivery riders were once obscure and ignored, until one day they suddenly became the focus of public attention. Currently, there is relatively little online experience shared regarding pickers. Through Siqi’s sharing today, we hope more people can understand what pickers are going through behind the operations of fresh food e-commerce platforms.

100 People Who Feed Us

Who are the people using their hands, wisdom, and lives to support our three daily meals? What challenges and aspirations, confusions and hopes define their lives?

The rice in your bowl, the vegetables on your plate, and every meal ordered on your phone hide a vast and complex real world. To touch the true pulse of this world, Foodthink’s podcast, Food Talk, has launched a series called “100 People Who Feed Us”. By following the vivid experiences of 100 practitioners, we aim to map a professional spectrum of “food” and “farming”, presenting the most authentic lived experiences behind our food.

Compiled by: Li Ye

Edited by: Yuyang