The Fresh-Food E-Commerce 30-Minute Delivery Myth Begins with the Picker’s Three Minutes

The recruitment app advertised twenty yuan an hour, but only if you are fast enough. If I can’t pick a hundred items per hour, my hourly rate drops to just thirteen yuan. Under this system, even without the boss cracking a whip, workers will run — for the extra pay.

On my first day, I ended up on the Priority Watch List. Fortunately, as a newcomer, I wasn’t called out by the Site manager. On the screen, my effective-working-hours rate sat below thirty per cent. The very concept of “effective working hours” baffled me. We are clearly working in the workplace — why must those hours be split into effective and ineffective?

It was only later that I learned: if an order is marked as confirmed complete and you don’t immediately accept the next one, the system counts the gap as “idle time” — in other words, ineffective working time. But Pickers typically hit “Packing Complete” early, before they have actually packed, to avoid going over time. The packing process itself takes one or two minutes, and if the fruit or vegetables need careful inspection, that so-called “idle” stretch grows even longer. We are not idle at all, yet we are flagged as idle, so we simply have no time to catch our breath before plunging into the next sprint.

In this efficiency-above-all environment, I also felt a kind of loneliness.

One time, while picking, I knocked over a box of mandarins and a dozen rolled across the floor. I hurriedly set down what I was holding and scrambled to pick them up one by one — my hands shaking with the rush. Two or three Pickers were right beside me, but nobody came to help. Everyone was consumed by their own order.

I asked myself: if another Picker needed help, would I put my work down to lend a hand? The moment I realised the answer was “not sure”, I felt the true horror of this job. It encourages competition, chases efficiency, erodes mutual aid and deepens loneliness. It makes asking for help a burden and reaching out a form of self-sacrifice.

IV. Who Delivers Our “Perfect” Life?

For items like eggs and fruit such as blueberries, strawberries and table grapes, where the condition isn’t immediately obvious, we are required to inspect each one individually before packing, checking for rot, damage or blemishes. That alone can easily take a full minute.

The problem is that, to reduce the chance of going over time, Pickers often tap “Packing Complete” before they have actually finished packing. The moment they do, the delivery rider receives a collection alert for the order, and the timer pressure that has vanished from my side simply transfers to theirs.

In that moment, my interests and the delivery rider’s were irreconcilable. If the Picker doesn’t tap “Packing Complete” early, the order will definitely go over time; if the Picker taps it early but the rider arrives to find nothing ready, the system may flag the rider for late collection. Sister Lin warned me, “Be quick, now. If the rider waits more than a minute, they might hit ‘Appeal’ and you’ll get five yuan docked from this order. If you can’t make it in time, be sweet about it, right? Say something nice — ask them to hold on a moment.”

Most of the time, the riders don’t actually file an appeal. At worst, I have seen them “nudge a bit” or “shout a word or two”, while the Pickers answer sweetly and their hands fly. About fifteen Pickers work at the site each day, three-quarters of them women, while nearly every delivery rider who comes to collect is male — I realised that what Sister Lin had been teaching me was a deeply gendered survival strategy.

On my very last day, I still received a customer complaint. Ten yuan was docked from my pay, with no room for negotiation. If each order contains eight to ten items, a part-time Picker earns less than two yuan per order. A single customer complaint means five orders done for nothing.

Beyond fruit appearance, mis-picks and omitted items are the other most common triggers for complaints. Once past the beginner stage, Pickers move from one order at a time to two, meaning you have to sort on the run — deciding which items belong to order one and which to order two, and slotting them into the correct plastic bags. Because the work demands speed, putting an item in the wrong bag is all too easy.

It suddenly struck me that I, too, had once tapped “Complaint” on a platform’s interface when an item I had ordered failed to arrive. Yet I had never truly grasped what was happening behind that tap, or what my complaint actually meant. Only when I no longer wielded the “power to punish” that platforms ostensibly grant to consumers, but became the one being punished myself — only then did I understand.

In this era, people do indeed inhabit different spaces, different worlds. And that division, in a time when everything feels so frictionless, has grown ever more rigid, ever more hidden.

We want “perfect” fruit, a “perfect” life, yet we have little idea how many pairs of hands a piece of fruit passes through before it reaches ours. What must those who grow it, those who store it, those who transport it, those who sort it give up — how must they reshape their own bodies and lives — to jointly produce this “perfection”?

But is such a life truly perfect? Who gets to define perfection? Is fruit without a single blemish perfect? Is a life of efficiency and convenience perfect?

At the very least, once we recognise that behind every morsel of food stand countless workers — delivery riders, Pickers and more — serving this vision of perfection amid tension and anxiety, we must press the question again: what does a perfect life actually look like?