The 30-Minute Fresh Food Delivery Myth Starts With the Sorter’s 3 Minutes

The recruitment app advertises a rate of 20 yuan an hour for part-timers, but this applies only if you work fast enough. Should I fail to pick 100 items in an hour, my pay drops to just 13 yuan an hour. Under this system, even without a boss cracking a whip, workers are driven to keep running simply to boost their wages.

On my first day, I found myself on the ‘flagged for attention’ list. Fortunately, being a newcomer, I escaped criticism from the station manager. On my screen, my ‘effective working time’ rate sat below 30%. The very notion of ‘effective working time’ left me utterly bewildered. We were plainly on the job, so why should our hours be arbitrarily split into effective and ineffective?

I later learned that if an order is marked as complete and you do not immediately accept the next one, the gap in between is logged by the system as ‘idle time’—that is, non-productive working hours. To avoid triggering timeouts, sorters typically press the ‘packing complete’ button before the item is actually boxed. The packing process itself takes a minute or two, and if fruit or vegetables require careful inspection, the ‘idle’ period stretches even longer. Yet, with no actual downtime, we were left with no choice but to keep moving: barely catching our breath before diving straight into the next order.

Within this relentless, efficiency-driven environment, I also began to feel a profound sense of isolation.

On one occasion, while picking items, I accidentally knocked over a box of mandarins, scattering more than a dozen across the floor. I hastily set down what I was holding to gather them up one by one, my haste leaving me rather flustered. There were two or three other sorters right beside me, yet not a single person offered a hand. Each was entirely absorbed in their own orders.

I asked myself whether, if one of the other sorters needed assistance, I would drop what I was doing to help. The moment I realised my answer was ‘I’m not sure’, I grasped the true, unsettling nature of this job. It fosters competition and chases efficiency, eroding mutual aid and amplifying isolation. It turns asking for help into a liability and offering assistance into a personal sacrifice.

IV. Who is making our ‘perfect’ lives possible?

With items like eggs, and fruits such as blueberries, strawberries, and grapes, where you can’t judge the condition at a glance, we are required to inspect each one individually for spoilage, damage, or scratches before packing. This alone often takes at least a minute.

The crux of the issue is that to minimise the risk of going over time, sorters frequently hit “Packing Complete” before the box is actually finished. The moment they do, the courier receives the dispatch notification to collect the order, and the ticking clock that’s disappeared from my workspace simply shifts onto their shoulders.

In that moment, my interests and the rider’s were completely at odds. If the sorter didn’t mark the order as packed early enough, the delivery would inevitably run late. But if the sorter marked it as packed too soon and the rider hadn’t yet collected it, the system would likely flag a pickup timeout. Lin reminded me: ‘Hurry up. If the rider waits more than a minute, they might lodge an appeal, and you’ll get docked five yuan for that order. If you’re running behind, just keep your tone sweet, alright? Say something polite and ask them to hold on.’

In most cases, riders don’t actually lodge appeals. At most, a rider would give a quick nudge or call out, while the sorters worked at lightning speed, responding with courteous words. Around fifteen sorters work at the depot each day, three-quarters of them women, whereas the riders who arrive to collect orders are almost entirely men. It struck me that what Lin was teaching me was a highly gendered survival strategy.

On my final day, I still received a customer complaint. Ten yuan was deducted from my pay, with no room for negotiation. Given an average of eight to ten items per order, a part-time sorter earns less than two yuan for each one completed. A single complaint effectively wipes out the pay for five orders.

Aside from the quality of the groceries, incorrect or missing items are frequent grounds for complaints. Once you pass the probation period, you move from processing one order at a time to two simultaneously. This means that while moving around the station, you have to keep track of which items belong to the first order and which to the second, placing them in the correct plastic bags. Given that speed is paramount, it’s all too easy to put an item in the wrong bag.

I suddenly remembered that I, too, once clicked “Complain” on the platform’s interface when I failed to receive an item I had ordered. But I never truly understood what lay behind the scenes, nor what my complaint actually meant. It only became clear when I no longer held the “power to punish” that platforms lend to consumers, but instead became the one subject to it.

In this day and age, people undeniably inhabit different spaces and settings. Such divisions, in an era defined by such convenience, have only grown more entrenched and obscured.

We crave “perfect” fruit and a “perfect” life, yet remain unaware of the countless hands that handle a single piece of fruit before it reaches our door. What must the growers, the storers, the drivers, and the sorters sacrifice? How must they reshape their bodies and lives to collectively engineer such “perfection”?

But is this kind of life truly perfect? Who gets to define perfection? Is a fruit without blemishes flawless? Is an efficient, convenient existence truly ideal?

At the very least, when we recognise that behind every item of food lies a multitude of workers—from delivery riders to sorters—labouring under tension and anxiety to uphold this version of perfection, we must revisit the question: what does a perfect life actually look like?