Who Is Making Us Speed Up? A Discussion Between Fresh Grocery E-Commerce Warehouse Pickers and Consumers

@觀宸奕: I used to work at Meituan’s Xiaoxiang. No Social insurance, and exhausting to the point of breaking. Rest was forbidden on weekends and statutory public holidays — if you wanted time off, it had to be Monday to Friday, so you basically got four days off a month. Going over time meant getting shouted at; most of the time you had to finish picking two orders within three minutes. Some orders were all frozen goods, and you’d freeze half to death searching the cold store for products. Resignation had to be given 30 days in advance, with no provision for settling pay on the spot, and before your last day you still had to be put on the Roster. Working hours were basically eight to twelve hours a day. However long you stayed, Xiaoxiang Supermarket’s staff app only ever counted 11 hours a day, yet the Rosters scheduled shifts well beyond 11 hours. After 11 hours, the extra time didn’t count, but you still had to wait to clock out — otherwise you’d be marked absent. You were effectively forced to work for free, earning only a few pennies in commission.

@Quella Lin: I did some part-time work and want to share my experience: one shift was seven to eight hours, from 4 p.m. to midnight, averaging 25,000–30,000 steps a day (and I was only part-time — I can’t imagine how full-timers manage Rosters of ten or eleven hours!). A customer complaint about produce not being fresh meant a 10-yuan deduction. When picking fruit and vegetables quickly, you had to check every item with extra care; soft fruits like blueberries, strawberries and loquats took a long time. Cracked eggs, even when not caused by the rider, meant a 20-yuan deduction. After three consecutive days I caught a mild cold. You’d run back and forth between the frozen section, the chilled section and the ambient-temperature section — in the ambient area there was only a fan and you’d be drenched in sweat, then you’d dash into the chilled or frozen section and freeze half to death. That’s exactly why staff turnover is so high — they’re always recruiting.

@热情华夫饼: You often see delivery scooters on the road with an external subwoofer bolted on, blasting music at full volume. A friend and I once speculated that it might be a way for delivery drivers to assert their presence in urban spaces. But then I heard a driver who does this explain himself: the tight delivery schedules mean he has to run red lights frequently, and playing music loudly ensures that cars at junctions notice him from far enough away to reduce the chance of a collision.

@蒹葭: Warehouse pickers on fresh grocery e-commerce platforms live in a constant state of high pressure constructed by algorithms, data metrics and piece-rate pay. Mispicks and missed items are an inevitable structural problem — and for every courier, scrapes and collisions are nearly unavoidable, too. My uncle is one of them. He has done this work for well over a decade, through several rounds of technological change. He always eats like a whirlwind. Before I’ve even picked up my chopsticks, he’s already finished. He’s actually quite a reserved person by nature. But last year, on a rainy day, he collided with someone while making a delivery. He broke his femur and is still recovering at home. Low educational qualifications and a lack of voice in public discourse reduce this whole group to a silent underclass, crushed between the weight of daily life and the demands of the algorithm.

@Anonymous: I’ve never used a grocery app. I’ve disliked them ever since the day they appeared, because of the environmental impact. I reuse plastic bags over and over when I buy groceries, but fresh grocery e-commerce platforms deliver a pile of non-recyclable plastic with every order.

@来去之间: They’ve been killing off physical stores. Have you noticed how fewer and fewer offline supermarkets there are?

@6: As a consumer, those life-or-death three minutes are probably just a moment when I have let my mind wander without even noticing. From what I recall, Xiaoxiang is indeed fast, but really, if it were a little slower — five minutes, ten minutes — the difference to the consumer’s experience would not be all that great, would it? What I care about is mainly the quality and getting the right quantities. After all, I believe most people are still willing to understand one another. Forging humans into machines and turning machines into people is a warped value system. Even if we slow down a little, surely the sky will not fall.

@露mio: Why do we let algorithms squeeze us? Sigh — I am being squeezed too. Hearing someone speak up for me suddenly makes my heart ache.

@cora: Why must everything be picked within three minutes? The way the platform operates is truly exploitative of its workers. If a customer is in a great rush, logically they should not place an order at all — they should go downstairs and buy it themselves. If they are willing to wait for someone to deliver to their door, that means they can wait.

@来去之间: The platform will not give you that chance to breathe. Its system is packed with performance targets; your pressure is their performance target.

@暮夏之后: Honestly, as a customer I truly do not mind those ten-odd minutes. What I buy is fresh produce — it is not something I eat immediately. Even when it arrives, do I not put it straight into the fridge and take it out when I need it? This 30-minute delivery requirement was set by the platform to seize market share, and then they go all out squeezing ordinary workers.

@G: Saying you are not in a rush is of no use. The platform’s algorithm does not care whether the rider lives or dies — the delivery must arrive on time.

@Lzx: Yesterday I worked five and a half hours and racked up seven customer complaints. Absolutely unbelievable.

@尤利西斯: If you receive your order and notice an item is missing, and you contact the store manager directly — does that still count as a complaint?

@哦喔: If a customer complains about a product and the reason is valid, the warehouse picker still has to bear that complaint. On top of that, pickers face pressure from two other sides. First, they cannot exceed the three-minute picking time limit — if they regularly do, the site manager will have a word with them, because the site’s fulfilment rate must be maintained. Second, if you have just finished picking and tap “packing” immediately, the rider will complain, and the rider site manager will complain too. But if you do not tap it early enough, the site manager will say you are over time.

@Freya: Reading this makes me a little sad. I rely quite a lot on Hema and Dingdong, and I had no idea there was such cruelty behind the convenience. A few days ago, a delivery rider spilled the container on the way to my door — some of the sauce from the chopped-chilli steamed fish head had sloshed out. He kept apologising and insisting on paying for it. I told him not to worry, that I would just transfer it to a bowl at home. I thought that was the end of it. Then the next day, on the delivery platform, I saw that he had left a message in the chat at the time, begging me not to leave a bad review or request a refund, because he would face a serious performance penalty…

@范范: Over the past year I have been ordering from Pupu and Xiaoxiang regularly — especially since there is a Pupu right downstairs from our home. I have seen their part-time job adverts posted around. I had no idea the picking step could be so disheartening. The algorithm itself is not designed to exploit workers, but the people in charge use it to enforce “time management”, making every single “accident” an impermissible event. Anyone who regularly uses time-management apps to plan their day knows how impossible that really is. But the author should not feel guilty about past complaints — it is the capitalists who have linked complaints directly to the lives of workers. I have filed complaints myself, twice — for example, when I received stale vegetables or when the weight was short. A consumer’s needs deserve to be met too.

@油菜花: This article really hit home. Last year I struggled to find work and ended up going for a part-time interview at Pupu Supermarket — their model is essentially the same as Xiaoxiang’s. On interview day, I could feel the tension and pressure bearing down on the pickers. They were racing against the clock, memorising product locations and zone codes for addresses, all represented as codes. Even once you are proficient, you have to pick several orders simultaneously, several bags dangling from each hand, many of them heavy — it is literally a job of “brain plus brawn”, and it is truly exhausting for young women. I asked myself whether I could really do it. In the end, I did not go back.

@观花: Last week I bought soy products, yoghurt and fruit from Chaoshifa on Taobao Flash Purchase. After I hit send, three minutes later I saw the status had already changed to “calling for a rider”. I said to my dad: “Surely platforms don’t need to race each other this hard! If I happen to be short a piece of ginger while cooking and need it urgently, they won’t even deliver a single piece — I have to walk downstairs to the little vegetable stall in the courtyard and buy it myself. What I order from them is stuff I don’t need in a hurry. There’s no need to rush over here like that.”

@jam: Even Duoduo Maicai needs warehouse pickers to sort the items, you know. A large item pays six and eight fen per piece.

@黄映红: I did a part-time job as a warehouse picker at Walmart — thirty fen per item. Sometimes an order was just one or two items, but you still had to pack it all up before you could take the next one. No matter how few items an order had, you had to finish within ten minutes. Sometimes you spent ages looking for something and could not find it (the shop was out of stock), and then you had to phone the customer to confirm a different brand or size. It averaged out to a mere ten to fifteen yuan an hour.

@来去之间: That won’t work. Once an order is placed, it circulates only within the system. If you phone the rider and say there is no time to deliver and that they can mark it as received and deliver it slowly, the system monitors call records. If the rider actually dares to mark it as received, they are fined on the spot. And if the rider does mark it as received but you have not received the goods, and you call the rider or customer service, then the moment the rider answers the phone, a whole day’s work is gone — a 300-yuan fine!

@芽口: Peak hours are 4:30 to 7:30 p.m. — try to place your orders outside that window. Avoid putting too many heavy items in a single order. And make more of an effort to shop in person, reducing your reliance on fresh-food supermarkets.

@yyyyyyyyyyyy: In reality, cutting back on online shopping and spending more in physical stores is what would actually support the economy. Otherwise, all the brick-and-mortar shops shut down, and with no competition left, online e-commerce prices will just keep climbing.

@殷羽sama: Consumers should join forces and boycott the platforms that exploit warehouse pickers and delivery riders beyond every limit. There should be an anonymous rating system where workers can score these companies. Those that abuse their staff, withhold pay, or foster high-pressure cultures would all receive low scores, causing their standing in society’s assessment to drop. Must it always take someone dying before the public starts boycotting a particular brand?