Running Inside the Algorithm: Fresh Food E-Commerce Warehouse Pickers
Foodthink Says
What you may not know, however, is what lies behind the platforms’ convenient promise of “delivery within 30 minutes”: the brutal reality of fresh food e-commerce warehouse pickers, who clock “30,000 steps a day, 30 fen per item”. From the moment you place your order, the relentless countdown of the algorithm and the verbal abuse of supervisors drive them to run, weaving and darting through the narrow, cramped aisles of shelves to pick items for customers. Even hauling a case of 24 bottles of mineral water does not slow their sprint in the slightest.
Under such intense conditions, warehouse pickers – the flesh-and-blood extension of the algorithmic system – sustain the platform’s high-efficiency operations at the cost of their own bodies. What is more, the strict control over pickers has become a weapon with which platforms attack the traditional wet market, and the disappearance of wet markets means that both workers and consumers alike lose a space where people can connect over food.
In episode 55 of the Food Talk podcast, former JD 7Fresh warehouse picker He Siqi shares his observations and experiences from a stretch of time spent working in the role. This article has been compiled from that episode.
Guest of This Episode
Hosts of This Episode
I. The Pre-Employment Psychological Test
He Siqi: I searched on a job-hunting app and found that a JD 7Fresh supermarket near where I lived was hiring. During the interview, HR took me to the warehouse floor. The supervisor asked whether I’d done the job before and said it was really tough work. He said if I could take it on, I could come for a trial shift the next day. The trial shift was basically part-time work, paid hourly at just over 20 yuan an hour.
Yuyang: So does that kind of test also tell you that being a picker is an extremely pressurised job?
He Siqi: I think that was probably part of the reason. Their main worry about me from the start was whether I’d last, because there’s nothing else to this job – it’s just exhausting.
Tianle: How many pickers like you work at your store?
He Siqi: There should be about 20 in our work WeChat group, but pickers have a very high turnover rate. For example, on my first trial shift, a guy asked me, “Are you new here?” I said yes, and he just kept smiling at me. Two days later, he’d vanished.
II. 30,000 Steps a Day
He Siqi: I wasn’t tracking WeChat step counts during that time, but all my colleagues said they walked around 30,000 steps a day. Sprinting is probably the norm for two-thirds of our shift, because the remaining third isn’t peak time, so we can sit and rest for a bit. But once peak hours hit, we have to run. Let me give you an example. One day the supervisor sent a message in the group chat saying that pickers at other branches had already knocked over elderly shoppers, and that we needed to be careful when order-picking and not bump into customers. That’s because JD 7Fresh stores are laid out with the supermarket at the front and the warehouse at the back. We have to go out onto the sales floor to pick a lot of our items, so when it’s crowded, we still have to run. Our biggest headache is the 8 p.m. discounts, when loads of older people come in and queue up waiting for bargains – we simply can’t get through.
Tianle: How big are the supermarket and the warehouse? How do you decide whether to pick from the sales floor or from the warehouse at the back? Do you get instructions from some kind of device?
He Siqi: The supermarket is probably around 200 square metres. It’s not big, but you’re constantly running back and forth, because the sales floor is split into two sections – fruit and vegetables, and meat – so you keep having to go all over. What we hate most are orders that have items on both the sales floor and in the warehouse. We have a few tools, the main one being PDA – you know, one of those handheld devices that look a bit like a mobile phone. All the customers’ order details come to us through this device, and it shows whether a product is on the sales floor or in the warehouse.
Yuyang: Pacing back and forth all day is exhausting. I used to work in parcel delivery, and the space there was even smaller. Even without running, just walking back and forth is hard on your feet. How did you feel after your first day – did you crash into bed the moment you got home?
He Siqi: Actually, the first day had a bit of novelty to it, because a trainer showed me how to use his device and any overtime penalties weren’t my responsibility. I even had a small sense of achievement, like I’d picked up a new skill. But on the other hand, my feet hurt like mad, and I was genuinely shattered by the time I got home.
Yuyang: So the “delivery within 30 minutes” promised by platforms like Meituan Xiaoxiang and Dingdong Maicai is really the result of pickers and delivery riders working together. Once a customer places an order, how much time do you get for order picking?
He Siqi: Normally you get 9 minutes per order, no matter how many items are in it. There might be just one bird’s-eye chilli – 9 minutes. Or two cases of mineral water, or four or five watermelons – still 9 minutes. But those 9 minutes aren’t guaranteed. The system gives you 9 minutes when an order is dispatched, but if nobody picks it up, the clock keeps ticking. By the time I grab it, there might only be 5 minutes left, and then I have to fit the whole pick into those 5 minutes.
He Siqi: We pickers fall into two categories: part-time and full-time. Part-timers are paid per order – 1.85 yuan a go, and it doesn’t matter whether the bag has one item or twenty in it, they still only get 1.85 yuan. Full-timers, though, are paid per item. So if an order only has one item, I get just 30 fen. The system sends part-timers all the big orders, because no matter how many items there are in a big order, they only get 1.85 yuan. The small orders get routed to us full-timers, and sometimes I spend the whole afternoon picking nothing but one-item orders. Right from the start, I could tell there was something dodgy going on, and when I checked with the supervisor, he admitted the system was deliberately dispatching orders that way.
Tianle: The PDA locks down employees’ time completely. It makes it easier for the fresh-food platform to push workers to be more efficient in exactly this way. Ordinary supermarket staff aren’t nearly as pressured as pickers.
Yuyang: Do you think it would be fairer if the fee were based on the weight of the order? After all, lugging heavy stuff back and forth is far more exhausting.
He Siqi: I think weight should count for something. We constantly get orders for those 5-litre bottles of mineral water, or a full case of 24 Wahaha bottles. It’s a hassle for me to lift them, and the delivery rider has trouble lifting them too. When we get orders like that, we do grumble about it.
Tianle: Are you forced to accept orders the way ride-hailing drivers are, or can you browse and grab orders like riders do in the rider hub?
He Siqi: We can’t browse or grab orders. We only accept them through the PDA scanner. Once an order comes in, we can’t even see how many items are on it. After we finish one order, a printer spits out a receipt, and only then does it send us the next one. Just like with food delivery, we have a top picker here too. If you want to earn more, you need to tick a few boxes: first, you’ve got to be able to walk – your feet have to be tough. Second, you’ve got to be quick on your feet mentally – you need to know which storage slot each product is in, so when an order comes in you already have a mental route planned. And third, your hands have to be quick too. Once you reach the storage slot, you need to grab the item and put it in the basket immediately. Packing also has to be lightning-fast – a beginner and a seasoned veteran are worlds apart in packing speed. The quicker your hands, the higher your efficiency, and the more orders you can pick in a day.
He Siqi: Yoghurt itself is kept in a fixed area – say the first row in Zone Six is all yoghurt – but the exact position within that area, you have to keep going back before it sticks in your memory. There’s a saying: “learn by doing.”
III. “No Dignity in Daily Life”
Tianle: Can you really get used to this?
He Siqi: Actually, Tianle is spot on – you never adapt. You just endure it, because you have no choice but to endure. As soon as I left, I adapted.
Tianle: It’s like Sisyphus pushing the boulder – you’re certainly shattered by the end of the day. And if you get a proper rest, you feel you can go again the next day.
He Siqi: The crucial thing is, I don’t feel all that tired while I’m actually working, but the moment I stop, I feel completely wiped out. Every evening when I get home, I sit down for a while and I just feel so exhausted – resting actually feels more painful than not resting. I start work at 8 a.m. and usually finish around 9 p.m., thirteen hours, and I cycle home every day, getting in by 9.30. You only get one day off a week, and you’re not allowed to make it a weekend day.
Tianle: That’s a massive workload. Thirteen hours times six – that works out to 896, even one hour more than 996.
He Siqi: It’s more than 13 times 6, actually. Monday to Friday they might schedule you for 12 or 13 hours, but by Saturday and Sunday it goes up to 14 hours. In 12 to 14 hours, we get through somewhere between 100 and 200 orders. I lost five or six jin – roughly two and a half kilos – in the 31 days I was there, because under that kind of intense labour your rest time is limited and you can’t eat properly either; you just grab a quick mouthful and that’s that.
In truth, it’s not as though orders come in during every hour of the day – in a 13-hour shift, we actually have enough work for about eight hours. But to keep the platform’s capacity running, they need someone stationed there long-term to ensure a timely response. Even during quiet spells they don’t let us rest. Sometimes in the afternoon when orders are few, the supervisor makes us get up and reorganise the storage slots. Reorganising storage slots used to be handled by dedicated shelf stockers, but the platform later scrapped the role and left it to the pickers.
Yuyang: Among the various models used by fresh-food platforms, forward warehouse is arguably the most commercially promising, but it seems it still comes at the cost of strict labour control.
He Siqi: Our supervisor shouts at people constantly – at any moment he’ll drag you over and give you a telling-off. Once he’s finished berating you, it colours your whole working day. He mostly sits in his chair watching the data, and if an order of mine is about to go over the deadline, he starts calling out to me. I can hear him shouting even from the sales floor – “Why is this one past the deadline again! What’s wrong with this order?” And the pressure is enormous. I’m already over the deadline, and his shouting only makes me more frantic. Being called out in front of everyone is the most humiliating thing there is.
A few of my colleagues generate so many customer complaints that our supervisor has been put into a “penalty room” by JD 7Fresh’s management system. The platform then requires them to discipline these pickers, and one form of punishment is to make employees hand-copy the packing regulations and photograph the result to send to the supervisor. To be honest, when it happened to me I found it almost unbelievable – we were being treated like little schoolchildren, completely at their mercy, with no dignity whatsoever. But in reality, everyone did copy them. For a picker, perhaps as long as there’s no monetary fine, this kind of punishment is bearable; it just hit me particularly hard. Since that incident, I’ve come to realise that in this society, it’s in the workplace – in the world of wage labour – that capital’s grip on us is actually the tightest. For pickers like us, dignity is simply absent from the working day.
IV. Yet Another Day of Paying to Work
Tianle: So offering a fish-filleting service is great for consumers, because you can get a cleaned fish at home and drop it straight into the pan – really convenient. But for the people doing it on the shop floor, it’s not quite so pleasant. Is the deveining service something you select on the app, or does the customer add it themselves?
He Siqi: The customer can add it in the notes, and if they do, we absolutely have to honour it. If we don’t, the customer can file a complaint, and that affects the store’s performance data.
Tianle: Maybe we should cut this bit – otherwise everyone will start making unreasonable requests like this.
Yuyang: Do complaints come with fines?
He Siqi: Yes, they do. For example, if I get a customer complaint on an order, I’m fined between 20 and 30 yuan on the spot – but that order itself might only earn me two or three yuan, or even just a few jiao. In my first few days on the job I kept telling my colleagues, ‘Yet another day of paying to work!’ Why did I say that? Because I kept getting complaints.
Tianle: What other kinds of complaints do you get?
He Siqi: Take the complaint that got me hand-copying the packing regulations, which I mentioned earlier – how does that come about? Say an order has six items, and we need to scan the barcodes of all six on the PDA before the order is marked as complete. If I can’t find one item, my instinct in the beginning was just to keep looking – but by the time I found it, the order was already over the deadline. Later I learned there was a way around the clock – “bypassing the scan”. Every product has a code that shows up on the PDA. When I couldn’t find an item, another picker would tell me to “bypass the scan” – which means just keying in the numeric code directly without scanning, and the order still counts as done. But once a colleague found the item for me, I’d often forget during packing that something was missing from that order. That’s when customers are most likely to complain. The way to prevent a complaint is for me to place a re-delivery order on the JD 7Fresh app myself. Say I order a bottle of water, I keep the water for myself, and the delivery rider brings the missing item to the customer. I get a free bottle of water out of it, but in the end I’m effectively paying the delivery fee myself – yet another day of paying to work.
Tianle: Human empathy is strange, isn’t it? It’s so hard to feel unless you’ve lived through it yourself.
V. “Even on Your Period, You Still Have to Enter the Freezer”
He Siqi: Piece-rate pay gives pickers the illusion that they earn more by working more, but the reality is that the hours we put in are extraordinarily long.
Tianle: So what kind of people do you see working as pickers? Despite the high turnover, plenty of people still take on this kind of job.
He Siqi: They’re all young people around 30, and if you’re 40, you’re already considered older. There was one man in his 40s from Yangzhou, Jiangsu, who was noticeably a bit slower than the younger workers and less adept at handling problems. Women might be slightly more numerous. We had a female colleague who seemed to have worked there ever since the store opened, and the reason she’d stayed so long was that the job came with Social insurance. There’s one thing about the women among our pickers – they’re actually quite young, but they look far older than their years, probably because of the intense physical toll of the work.
Then there was another female colleague, 24 years old, who wasn’t very strong. Sometimes we’d team up to haul ice packs out of the freezer for packing. I told her, ‘Make sure you call me when you’re pulling ice packs out.’ The first few times she did, but once she carried three baskets of ice packs by herself – each basket weighing around 10 kilos. I asked her how she could manage something that heavy on her own. She just said, almost airily, ‘What can you do when you’re working away from home? If you don’t do it, who will?’ That line really stuck with me. She’s an incredibly strong, tough person.
He Siqi: Yes, sometimes a female colleague might be on her period and still have to go into the freezer or the cold storage room, and the toll that takes on her body is enormous. Our top picker works incredibly long hours every day, to the point that her cycle has become irregular. I felt quite moved when I heard about it. She’s picking over 200 orders a day, or earning that kind of money a month, but the price she pays behind the scenes is enormous.
Under labour law, if you work the number of hours I’ve been putting in, you’d be entitled to far more than 10,000 yuan. At JD 7Fresh, pickers and delivery riders work in the same space, and they share one common trait: if you want to earn money, you have to put in extraordinarily long hours. Every single day you endure, constantly waiting for the algorithm to dispatch orders to you.
Yuyang: Exactly. We only see how much they earn in a day, but not how grueling the work behind that is – we don’t know what the workers’ situation is after all this, whether it’s the damage to their bodies or what their career prospects look like.
He Siqi: There are no career prospects. We’re just consumables.
VI. 7,500 Plastic Bags a Day
He Siqi: The supervisor once posted some figures in the work group chat – just before 3 p.m. on 26 July, we had already picked 1,471 orders. I did some sums myself: at that rate, by the time we clock off at 11.30 p.m., we’d hit 2,500 orders or more. If you assume each order needs at least three plastic bags on average, that’s a conservative estimate of 7,500 bags. Add in any frozen or chilled items, and you also need an insulated bag for each one, plus one or two ice packs. So the number of plastic bags, insulated bags and ice packs used in a single day is quite staggering.
Tianle: And then fruit and vegetables all have to be packed separately in plastic containers – even drinks get wrapped in a layer of plastic. We often say the biggest problem with plastic packaging isn’t really the material itself, but the fact that it’s only used once. So could JD 7Fresh possibly do any kind of recycling? For instance, when the goods arrive, the customer takes everything out but leaves the plastic bags or the insulated box behind – SF Express has actually started offering that kind of service.
Tianle: But there’s a risk for the company here: consumers might not buy into it and may not want to accept recycled bags, because a lot of people are simply indifferent to environmental causes.
VII. When E-Commerce Hits the Wet Market – What Have We Lost?
Tianle: I’ve been thinking about something lately. In the past, even buying things involved interacting with another person. Now a lot of people don’t want to go to the wet market, feeling that every visit means a battle of wits with the stallholders and endless haggling over prices. E-commerce and supermarkets seem so much better – fixed prices, no risk of being ripped off. But have we stopped to think about what the working conditions are like for supermarket staff? Or for the workers in the forward warehouses behind e-commerce? Pickers, shelf stockers and delivery riders are, in a very real sense, the flesh-and-blood extensions of a vast system – bodies that exist only to do the work a data system cannot handle, with no need for any human feeling at all. The wet market, by contrast, is at least a living market – a place of exchange and conversation, where there’s something human about the interaction.
Today many young people, eating takeaway and having groceries delivered to their door, feel they never need to deal with another soul. But this kind of lifestyle bleeds into relationships with colleagues, with family, even with friends. Dealing with people is a constant exercise – it has its positives and its negatives, certainly – but if none of us ever put ourselves through it, we become people who interact only with machines. That is a state of affairs I find very hard to accept.
Tianle: After you finish your shifts as a picker, Siqi, do you still order groceries from these platforms?
He Siqi: I do, but not often. Ironically, the period when I ordered from these platforms the most was while I was working as a picker. I was fascinated by the products – I’d be picking orders and see all sorts of breads and sliced loaves, and since I never had time for breakfast, I’d just order them. Once I stopped being a picker, I barely order online any more. I have more time now, so I can go to the supermarket or the wet market in person.
In truth, if an order of mine arrives a few minutes late, I don’t get too worked up about it. But the platform obsesses over the data and demands delivery within the promised timeframe. So to uphold the company’s image of high efficiency, they drill that responsibility down through every single layer, and in the end it falls squarely on us pickers, day in, day out.
Yuyang: Exactly – no matter what, the promise is that the customer’s order must arrive within 30 minutes. Delivery riders, too, were largely invisible for a long time, until one day they suddenly found themselves in the spotlight. Right now, there’s very little online about the experience of being a picker, so through Siqi’s sharing today we hope more people will come to understand what pickers are going through behind the scenes of these fresh-food platforms.
The rice in your bowl, the vegetables on your plate, every meal ordered through your phone – behind them all lies a vast and complicated real world. To trace the true veins of that world, Foodthink’s podcast Food Talk has launched the series – “The 100 People Who Feed Us”. Following 100 practitioners through their vivid, lived experiences, the series maps a career landscape of food and farming, revealing the most honest life stories behind what we eat.
Edited by Yuyang