Turning People into Machines: Is Bianlifeng Really Smart?
I. “You Have Been Penalised and Demoted to Clerk”
A few months ago, Ms L, a store manager at a Bianlifeng branch in Beijing, suddenly received a message to this effect on her handheld terminal. As part of her daily routine, she was constantly monitoring this smartphone-like device, completing tasks pushed to the screen every few minutes.
But on this occasion, the notification simply read “Store Manager Replaced”—as routine as a prompt to stock shelves, mop the floor, or wipe down display cabinets.
Ms L had been managing the store since the first half of 2023. To this day, she remains in the dark about why she was demoted. “From start to finish, nobody spoke to me about it or explained why. I just received that one line from the system, and that was it—the decision was made.”
She suspects her demotion stems from failing to complete the mandatory “store manager self-inspection” on time over the preceding days. This routine requires checking the store’s cleanliness, product placement, and overall condition each day, then uploading photographs to the system.
Ms L recalls that the coffee and beverage machines, long idle in the store, were scheduled for removal. Seizing the opportunity, she wanted to reorganise the freed-up space to display ambient-temperature mineral water and soft drinks, hoping to boost sales. To pull this off, she volunteered to work two extra hours each day that week on top of her standard twelve-hour shift, clocking in from 7 am to 9 pm.
Amidst such grueling labour, Ms L felt entirely justified in postponing the minutiae of the “store manager self-inspection”. After all, priorities must be weighed, and she was convinced her efforts were squarely aimed at driving sales growth for the Bianlifeng outlet.
She simply could not fathom it: she had been doing everything within her power to lift Bianlifeng’s revenue, yet she was demoted for her trouble.
“Thinking about it still leaves me bitterly disappointed,” Ms L remarks, arguing that Bianlifeng’s management is “completely devoid of a human touch”.
Regrettably, her efforts and grievances will never be heard by Bianlifeng, a company that proudly markets itself as “intelligent”.
II.“The Robot is an Idiot”
Experienced store managers are a scarce resource in the convenience retail sector. Convenience Bee claims it takes two years to train a manager in a traditional chain, whereas they need only six months. In the eyes of founder Zhuang Chenchao, it is precisely this shortage of managers that has caused established rivals such as FamilyMart and 7-Eleven to “expand far too slowly”.
Convenience Bee’s proposed solution was straightforward: replace managerial decision-making with an algorithmic system. Zhuang Chenchao appears to genuinely believe that algorithms devised by engineers in an office block can remotely comprehend and control every variable across the company’s entire store network. During a presentation, he confidently declared, “Any point involving human intervention will drag down overall efficiency.” Frontline staff, he stated, are simply expected to “follow system directives and deliver a positive service experience for customers”.
But are algorithms really any smarter than a seasoned store manager?
In the space-constrained environment of a convenience store, precisely matching inventory with consumer demand is the make-or-break factor for revenue and profitability. To demonstrate the algorithm’s superiority, Convenience Bee cites an experiment: ten experienced 7-Eleven managers were asked to cut a store’s SKU count (stock-keeping units, or product categories) by ten per cent. The following day, sales fell by five per cent. When the same task was handled by the Convenience Bee algorithm, the drop was a mere 0.7 per cent.
“The system will even tell you exactly how many meat buns, how many vegetable buns, and how many boxed meals to prepare each shift,” Ms L said. Yet in practice, she found the algorithm-driven inventory management far from foolproof.
“Sometimes we end up drowning in stock for certain items, while others vanish completely. We’ll have crates of chips arriving non-stop even though they barely move off the shelf. Meanwhile, fast-selling drinks might not show up the following day at all. Given that our location is surrounded by office workers, you’d expect a wider selection of bread and pastries. Instead, we only get a handful of varieties, and we’re constantly having to complain about it.”
Last winter, as colder weather drove customers towards room-temperature bottled water, Ms L decided to stock some on the shelves. To her surprise, the store’s patrol robot snapped a photo of the display, flagged it as a violation of shelf-placement protocols, and forced her to rearrange the stock to comply.
“Customers walk in and marvel at how ‘smart’ our robot is! But honestly, my colleagues and I can’t help but curse it as a complete idiot half the time.”
Even when Ms L and her team believe the deliveries are mismanaged, there is no direct way to raise the issue with Convenience Bee. The system has already pre-determined the inventory list and dictates the exact shelf position for every single item. If there is a problem with a delivery, Ms L’s only option is to log a “task” in the system for the central operations team to address. “The process is incredibly convoluted. We can barely find anyone to escalate it to, and frankly, nobody seems to care about these kinds of issues anyway.”
Despite Liu Lu’s repeated requests to reduce hot meal supplies, the response she received was: “According to algorithmic projections, the store still has opportunities to sell hot meals… The algorithmic system lacks a corresponding operational SOP (standard operating procedure), and human intervention is not permitted.” As a result, in her capacity as a franchisee, Liu Lu has no authority to adjust purchase quantities for specific items in real time. As a frontline operator who knows her customers best, she can only watch helplessly as customers leave, while bearing the operational losses from excessive product waste.
III.“The Little Bees Must Always Be Around”
Bainifeng’s solution is algorithmic: a staff member’s daily workload is broken down into 70 to 80 simple tasks, with instructions dispatched to them via handheld terminals.
Ms L only received a week of induction training before starting work. “The training focused mainly on operating the handheld system. Once you learn how to use the device and follow its prompts to complete tasks, you’re basically ready for the job. I didn’t take long before I was promoted to store manager.”
Ms L often tells new staff: “Just get on with it.” This is the hard-won lesson she’s drawn from her time at Bianlifeng: don’t second-guess or overthink, because the algorithmic system has already mapped out your entire day in meticulous detail.
“If you work there long enough, you start to feel like a walking machine. You arrive at 7 am and immediately start preparing hot breakfast items. Once that rush ends around 9:30 am, you’re straight into prepping lunch.”
“We are strictly forbidden from speaking with customers, as Bianlifeng considers any interaction a waste of time. But self-service ordering is undeniably efficient. On my own, I can easily sell over thirty hot meals during a single lunch rush.”
Ms L explained that once the meal rush has passed, the staff are far from idle. Every few minutes, a handheld terminal dispatches a new task, typically mundane chores such as wiping down shelves, sweeping the floor, restocking, or counting inventory. Constantly driven by these automated directives, employees remain in a state of perpetual busyness until they clock off at 7pm.
“Sometimes I couldn’t see the point in wiping the shelves over and over. Later I realised their guiding principle is simply ‘no one is allowed to be idle.’”
The monotonous and heavy workload tends to breed complacency among the staff, which is when the “electronic overseers” kick in. At Ms L’s store, more than thirty ceiling-mounted cameras constantly monitor the team. “When I first started, a veteran colleague told me that as long as the system sees your hands on the shelves, you’re doing enough – you don’t need to take it so seriously. I didn’t dare try it at first, but eventually I learned how to just go through the motions.”
“The little bees must always be here! The little bees must always be here!”
IV. Filling turnover with turnover
On this point, Ms L explained with some ambivalence: “To be fair, Bianlifeng does have its advantages. For people like us under heavy financial pressure, the tasks are straightforward and easy to pick up. As long as you’re willing to put in the work, you can earn a decent wage each month.”
The twenty-four-hour convenience stores operate on a two-shift system that runs seamlessly, with each shift lasting twelve hours. If you’re willing, you can work twelve hours a day, year-round, without a single day off.
In one particular month, she worked a total of 360 hours, labouring from dawn until dusk, drifting through each day in a daze. But when she received her pay of over ten thousand yuan at the end of the month, she said it was the thing that brought her the most joy.
Being demoted from store manager to floor staff was a devastating blow for Ms L. Stripped of her turnover commission, she would now only receive the base hourly rate of 22 yuan for regular staff, resulting in a sharp drop in her monthly income. As a regular staff member, she could no longer remain stationed at a single store as she had when managing. Each day, the system could assign her to different outlets within a ten-kilometre radius to cover vacancies left by last-minute absences, resignations, or dismissals.
“Most floor staff earn just 22 yuan an hour, and have to face this incredibly oppressive working environment every day. The turnover rate and staff churn at Bianlifeng are exceptionally high.”
Ms L believes Bianlifeng is attempting to “fill turnover with turnover” to solve this issue. However, the instability of constantly shifting work locations proved unacceptable to her, and she ultimately decided against continuing her employment at Bianlifeng as a regular staff member.
V. When humans are alienated into flesh-and-blood machines
Algorithms can indeed deliver a measure of cost-cutting and efficiency gains when it comes to tracking product ranges, pricing, footfall, shrinkage rates, and mapping optimal delivery routes. Bolstered by its smart-retail branding, Bianfeng also won over investors, enabling a period of meteoric expansion in its early days.
Yet from the end of 2021 onwards, reports of layoffs and store closures began to emerge, followed by an internal “hibernation plan” launched in 2022. According to Snow Leopard Finance, by February 2024, Bianfeng’s store count had plummeted from a peak of nearly 3,000 to just over 1,000, standing in stark contrast to the steady upward trajectory of the wider convenience store sector.
The sharp pivot from “meteoric growth” to “hibernation” suggests that an algorithm-driven operating model has not sparked a “revolution” in the convenience store industry. At the very least, Bianfeng’s algorithms proved nowhere near as miraculous as the founder claimed or investors had imagined.
As algorithms increasingly permeate every facet of commerce and daily life, Bianfeng’s miscalculations serve as a cautionary tale: an arrogant reliance on code, coupled with a disregard for the insights and experience of frontline workers, can ultimately backfire on a business. More importantly, a blind worship of high-tech solutions diminishes human creativity itself, reducing staff to flesh-and-blood machines numbly executing algorithmic directives. Viewed from this angle, employees and store managers like Ms L were not treated by Bianfeng as living, thinking individuals. Instead, they were reduced to extensions of the machines and code, carrying out tasks that technology alone had not yet mastered.
Ms L may well find another job once she leaves Bianfeng, but beyond its walls, countless algorithm-driven innovations are steadily rolling out across manufacturing, finance, services, and even agriculture.
Amid the clamour of these algorithmic machines, how can we ensure technology is harnessed to foster creation rather than becoming yet another crushing weight of exploitation and alienation for workers? This is not merely a question of economic efficiency; it is about the dignity of labour. To grapple with these issues, we must look not only at the technology itself but also seek answers beyond it.
Unless otherwise stated, all photographs were taken by the author.
Editor: Wang Hao Layout: Shi Wu