It's time to run out of condiments.
On April 14, in Changning District, Shanghai, Ele.me rider Huang Ming received a call from a resident to help buy salt.
Huang Ming rode an electric car for more than half an hour and asked 5 stores to find the salt.
He bought the last 10 packs, one for the resident, and kept the rest for delivery.
There are already people in the group of riders asking "where is the salt".
Another rider, Yue Dongchuan, who runs on four platforms including Hummingbird and SF Express, also received a call from a customer asking him to help his neighbor buy salt.
In the end, he didn't buy salt - bought two cans of doubanjiang.
The other party didn't mention the delivery fee, and he didn't say, "It was delivered in the bag."
"Greater Shanghai may not be short of supplies, but it feels very unbalanced," Yue Dongchuan said.
The riders interviewed denied the recent legend of "daily income exceeding 10,000", saying that this situation is very rare, unless the day is full of corporate orders with a single route and a high reward amount, "How bad is the experience?"
they decide to run
On April 10, when Huang Ming received a call from the company urging him to run an order, he had already eaten bibimbap with Laoganma spicy sauce for a week.
The community where he lives has been closed and managed since March 26 due to close contacts.
The news at the time said that it was "closed for 4 days".
Huang Ming bought 5 kilograms of rice and a small amount of green vegetables together with 3 fellow Anhui villagers and roommates. When he woke up in the morning, he ate a meal, and when he was hungry, he ate another meal in the afternoon.
Unexpectedly, the community was not lifted on April 1.
At that time, the society and enterprises kept calling for "release capacity", and the two roommates decided to go out to run orders, at the cost of going out and not being able to return.
Huang Ming was persuaded to live by his wife, who was also working in Shanghai.
The wife said that the virus is definitely harmful to people, no matter how big or small.
He and another roommate bought 25kg of rice for 280 yuan, and received a packet of kimchi, 3 onions and a few potatoes from the community.
On April 1st, Meituan rider Zhang Nian, who lives in a dormitory, also decided to go out to run a single with seven roommates.
In addition to responding to the call to "release capacity", another reason is that they are tired of instant noodles.
There is no kitchen in the collective dormitory, and the only electric kettle can be used to boil water for instant noodles, which is buzzing almost from morning to night.
Zhang Nian said that the purpose of working away from home is to earn money, and staying in the dormitory will definitely not be able to earn anything. It is better to go out and try his luck, and he has experience working in the epidemic.
Zhang Nian is 26 years old. Before going to Shanghai to work, he delivered food in Wuhan.
At the beginning of 2020, when the new crown pneumonia epidemic broke out in Wuhan, he was forced to return the ticket to return to his hometown in Hebei on the 29th day of the twelfth lunar month, and became a volunteer in the rental place, a community with more than 100 residential buildings.
"The idea at that time was similar to that of now. It was all for the sake of food and survival, and to be a volunteer to have food to eat." Zhang Nian said that nothing was prepared in the rental house. All five young roommates went to the community as volunteers. Strength, familiarity with the route, help the community unload, deliver, and disinfect.
At the time, they were literally running the "last mile."
The materials distributed by the government were pulled to the gate of the community, and they were unloaded and delivered to various buildings.
In the early days of Wuhan, the epidemic was violent. They were naked and wearing protective clothing and large diapers. They urinated and feces in it. They could not take off and rinse until they went to bed at night. They lived in temporary sheds and could not go back to the building to live. , "Wuhan was really hard at that time, but everyone's goals were very pure, just those few tasks, and the efficiency was high."
More than 20 days later, the epidemic in Wuhan has eased slightly, and more and more young people from the community have come out to volunteer.
Zhang Nian and other 6 people got out to do their original work.
The takeaway station where they are located, coordinated by the local command, accepted the task of delivering medicines to residents.
"Every day there is a person who is specifically staring at us and making orders for us." Zhang Nian recalled that after the pharmacy opened, they were only responsible for taking medicine, delivering medicine, and delivering alcohol. .
It has been closed for a long time, and many residents, especially the elderly, are short of medicines.
"Drug delivery is paid, and you can get a delivery fee for one order." Zhang Nian said.
Zhang Nian felt that Wuhan was caught off guard at the beginning. For example, the residents of the community where they were located were generally insufficient, and the first ten days were particularly difficult. However, after a large number of supplies arrived, they could be distributed quickly, "no worries about eating or drinking."
After being locked down in Wuhan for 76 days, Zhang Nian returned to the streets to deliver food. Due to the drop in delivery fees on the platform, he "couldn't run out of money for a day" and moved to Shanghai to work.
A single order in Shanghai can be about 2 yuan higher. "Running 50 orders a day will earn you an extra 100 yuan."
I did this in Shanghai for two years.
From April 3rd, Zhang Nian's community pass will no longer work.
Some platform companies claim to be coordinating designated hotels, which are not actually open to them.
The reason for the hotel is that "the price has not been negotiated", "the territory has regulations not to receive mobile personnel" or "requisitioned".
He asked friends who didn't come out to throw the futon out of the window and live under a viaduct.
On April 10, Huang Ming and his roommates had already finished eating the kimchi, onions, and potatoes. The Laoganma glass bottle had bottomed out. He stuffed the bottle into a garbage bag and fastened it—they didn’t want to smell the hot sauce anymore.
For the second time, they received a "vegetable pack" from the community: two carrots, two potatoes, two tomatoes, a piece of ginger, a few cloves of garlic and a box of canned food.
Huang Ming distributed these dishes to neighbors and decided to go out to run orders.
"It's all changed"
When he walked out of the community, Huang Mingcai found that the prices outside were very outrageous: 10kg of Northeast rice cost 160 yuan; 5 liters of rapeseed oil used to be able to buy two barrels for 130 yuan, but now only one barrel can be bought.
A customer wants to eat oranges, and the market vendors do not sell them by the pound, but by the individual—5 yuan each.
The customer was also stunned on the other end of the WeChat video, saying "I can't afford it, I won't eat it".
After only 14 days of lockdown, Huang Ming felt like a novice entering the arena. The sellers and markets he was familiar with before had changed.
He tried to bargain with the merchant, but the other party was tough, "you can leave if you don't buy it." More often, he simply ignored him because there were still many people who bought it.
Yue Dongchuan and other riders who came out 10 days early are already familiar with this new arena.
The person who has the goods and the channel to get the goods is the "uncle", and the riders who run errands and the residents who place the orders are in a disadvantaged position.
Order forms, pickup methods, and delivery routes are all being refactored.
Riders are generally divided into two categories: dedicated riders and crowdsourcing.
Zhang Nian explained that although the names of different platforms may be different, a simple understanding is the difference between full-time and part-time jobs.
Full-time riders work on a platform, and their salary is mainly paid monthly. The system dispatches orders and is responsible for a certain range of business districts. The advantage is that the delivery price of each order is relatively high and stable.
Part-time riders are more free, their income is settled daily, they can pick up and run across the city, and the delivery fee is not fixed. They can work part-time on multiple platforms at the same time, but they need to grab orders.
A dedicated rider opened the rider system on his mobile phone and introduced to the reporter that the red circle on the map represents the store in charge of their site. The redder the color, the more takeaway orders.
Since the closure and control management, many stores have closed, or are operating secretly and no longer display online. It is difficult for riders to accurately see the source of goods and store business information on the system.
The number of orders sent has dropped sharply, and many dedicated delivery riders have also turned to crowdsourcing to help buy and deliver.
On the page after the crowd-sourced riders log in to the system, the reporter saw that there is a list of pending orders with no end in sight in the "lobby".
Zhang Nian said that before the epidemic, everyone could determine whether to grab an order at a glance. Now, not only depends on the distance, route, and price, but most importantly, depends on what to buy.
The road in the past may not always be clear.
Most of the riders in Shanghai are concentrated in the city center and nearby areas such as Jing'an, Huangpu, Xuhui, and Changning. These areas are full of well-known shops, supermarkets and commercial pedestrian streets. Under normal conditions, a large number of orders are sent to the city every day.
Now that shops are generally closed, riders can't get to Pudong, and routes in other areas need to be reconsidered - because it's not clear which road has "broken".
Yue Dongchuan encountered many temporary road closures in Minhang District. The map showed that it was passable, but when he reached the intersection, he saw that there were barriers. The way to do it is to send it to others, but if I see the orders in those areas again, I will not take it."
Before April 6, they rarely sent vegetables and fruits because there was no supply.
Sometimes, the owner of the vegetable market with sufficient supply does not sell vegetables to the riders: he only accepts group purchase orders, such as high-priced vegetable bags with a unit price of 188 yuan and 288 yuan, and they are not allowed to buy them in it.
They try to avoid small shops and vegetable markets, and give priority to chain convenience stores and medium and large-scale stores when choosing sources of goods, and buy goods with clear prices for customers.
If they are lucky, they can get the shopping receipt, without wasting time on communication, they can directly deliver it to the gate of the community without contact, take pictures and leave.
"This was when the goods were available in the early days." Yue Dongchuan emphasized that later the convenience store was basically swept away, leaving only water and bento.
Supermarkets generally connect with major customers, and it is difficult for riders to pick up goods, and they are not sure which supermarkets are open, and some large shopping malls only open the back door of storage.
There is considerable randomness in store openings, and openings are just a gap in the door.
Their experience is that if you see a rider standing at the door, there is a high probability that the store is selling.
If there is no clear price tag, they will open a video call with the customer, so that the customer can see the goods and listen to the quotation.
If the other party decides to buy it, it will transfer the shopping money to the rider to check out, and then pay the errand fee when the goods are delivered.
Riders will share some shops selling goods in their respective groups, and when they see a rider with goods on the road, they will ask where they bought it.
"Everyone will say, I have never seen a monopoly." Yue Dongchuan said, because everyone knows that this store may not be open tomorrow, and can only be searched again, "One rider can't be found, 100, 200 will always be found."
Buying is actually asking for help
Before lockdown management, riders didn’t like to pay for help.
"It's too troublesome," Yue Dongchuan explained. Usually, the delivery of orders from point A to point B is very fast. Before the epidemic, this kind of help paid for one order here and one there. Not everything can be bought at once.
Now it is mainly to help pay and deliver orders.
"Actually, people who are locked at home are asking for help. They really lack supplies or medicines. Please help us riders who can still travel outside." This is one of the reasons why some riders are now off the platform.
There are comments accusing riders of making "black money" from trading off the platform, and calling on residents to keep evidence of transactions and complain to relevant authorities when Shanghai returns to normal.
Yue Dongchuan said that there is a reason for leaving the platform. Residents and riders have difficulties. "People outside may not be aware of the current situation of residents seeking help."
Since the closure and control management, there are not many groups that can be active on the street. Riders are one of them. However, the number of riders who are currently running orders is limited. Most of the time when residents place orders, no one takes the order. Once a rider is contacted , will immediately ask for a mobile phone number, add WeChat, and group with neighbors and friends. If there is any need for help in buying or delivering, the rider will directly contact the rider for help.
Several riders interviewed have added hundreds of WeChat accounts.
Sometimes when they are too busy, the riders will share the buying information with each other.
"The errand fee for a private order is generally 50 yuan per order. According to the distance, the quantity and weight of the goods, and then negotiated with the customer, 100 yuan per order is high, but it is very small." Yue Dongchuan said that the price is actually not high. , "Think about it, how much does it usually cost to deliver an order in the same city?"
Moreover, under the epidemic, there is still the biggest uncertainty - time, the time to find goods, line up, and detour.
A rider took an order for Coke and ran for an afternoon and couldn't find it. He wanted to refund half of the 100 yuan errand fee, but the other party confiscated it.
Residents who ask for help in private are not buying every day. If they can buy it, they basically ask the rider to buy a lot of goods at one time.
Yue Dongchuan said that orders are still based on platform orders. The platform integrates the needs of the whole city and saves communication costs.
Some private information for help is worrying, and if they can do it, they will not persuade them to find other channels.
For example, for infant milk powder and diapers, the riders have almost reached a tacit understanding, and they usually take orders quickly after seeing them.
In Xuhui District, Yue Dongchuan received an order from a girl asking for help to buy medicine.
They easily do not take prescription orders, because they need to wait in long queues to buy drugs, and they are easy to run into a wall: pharmacies have strict requirements on prescription drugs, and sometimes they need to report ID cards and check drug purchase records.
This time, there is a pharmacy behind Yue Dongchuan.
But the other party said that her medicine was for depression and she had to go to the mental health center to buy it.
When he arrived at the hospital, he saw the endless drug buying team, and he wanted to give up.
The woman said, "The situation is very urgent, I have no medicine in my hand, and I want to jump off."
In the end, he stood in line for more than 3 hours under the sun to buy medicine.
The lady tipped an extra $100.
A rider receives a "give away" message.
The client was a young man with acute gastroenteritis, who was writhing on the ground with pain, "like a knife in his intestines".
If you call 120 or 110, you have to queue up or you need to verify the hospital admission before you can send it.
He paid 100 yuan to have the rider take him to the door of the hospital.
The young man almost crawled out of the community.
The rider carried him on an electric bike and rode more than ten kilometers from Hongqiao to Xuhui, looking for a possible hospital.
Zhang Nian met an old man with gray hair in a closed community.
The old man may not be able to shop online, and he doesn't seem to know what's going on in the outside world. Standing on the fence next to the gate of the community, he asks the rider who comes to deliver the order, like buying food in a vegetable market, "How do you sell this?" "How much does one cost?" Jin?" "Are there any eggs for sale?"
When Zhang Nian saw it, he wanted to cry, because the old man looked like a grandfather who couldn't learn to use a smartphone.
He told the old man that this was all ordered by others and had to be ordered online.
He bought a carton of eggs and gave them to the old man.
Before the epidemic, the places where riders liked to send orders were hospitals, schools, residential areas with newer buildings and high-end residential areas.
"Because these places usually do not allow riders to enter, just put them at the door, which saves time and effort." Zhang Nian confessed that old communities and public housing properties are not strong enough, and often encounter situations where riders can be allowed in, but electric vehicles are not allowed in. , The floors of these communities are generally low, there are no elevators, the building number is unclear, and riders can easily get lost.
After the closure of these communities, the problem became more prominent.
Zhang Nian said that usually, it is not necessary for a rider to deliver it to the door, unless the epidemic situation in the community is very serious and the property and security are severely damaged, they can generally still undertake the delivery in the community, not to mention there are volunteers.
And old communities and public housing are worrying.
Zhang Nian's rental community consists of more than 10 6-storey public houses with more than 100 households. There are only a few cleaners and security guards in charge of the community.
Because there are riders and tenants such as Zhang Nian running orders outside, there is no shortage of supplies in the community.
Zhang Nian pulled up the WeChat group, and everyone regularly placed orders.
When they could enter the community before, they sent the supplies directly to the door of the building.
Since the community pass has expired, it has become a problem how to deliver the materials to the door of the building.
Some people asked the neighborhood committee for help. The neighborhood committee was far away from the community and lacked manpower. They asked the building to send representatives or select volunteers. Since there are many local elderly people and non-local people in the community, they usually walk less and no results were selected.
In the end, Zhang Nian came up with an idea: mobilize the security guards in the community to run more errands at a cost of 10 yuan per trip.
"Since the epidemic, the security guards have also worked hard, and many come from other places." Zhang Nian said that giving them more material incentives is easier than coordinating the people in the building.
Rider's non-combat losses
As soon as the news of SF riders' "daily income exceeding 10,000" came out, it caused heated discussions in the rider circle.
Zhang Nian said that at that time, everyone thought it was fake. Even the most powerful "single king", in this state, running fifty or sixty orders a day was almost the limit. There was only one possibility: the rider received the business order, or the Quite a high reward list.
The official reply from "SF Express" confirmed their guess: the knight completed a total of 60 intra-city delivery orders, which were placed by corporate users, and the total amount of commissions for orders was 10,067.75 yuan.
Including the user's reward of about 7856 yuan.
That is to say, the average income of the knight excluding rewards is about 36.9 yuan per order, and the average reward per order is about 131 yuan.
Yue Dongchuan received a similar order on April 9, taking traditional Chinese medicine from a hospital in Xuhui to door-to-door delivery. There were 37 orders in total, with a total income of more than 1,300 yuan, without any reward.
"This kind of order is very tiring, and it has to be delivered as quickly as possible." He didn't have lunch that day, and it was delivered from 9:00 in the morning to 3:00 in the afternoon.
Zhang Nian's highest income record was more than 3,000 yuan a day. From 8:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m., he ran more than 40 orders, and his leg injury recurred that night.
Zhang Nian said that he has indeed made money these days, but the peak period has passed, or the supply of goods is becoming more and more difficult to find.
Several riders showed their income to reporters: from the highest peak of more than 3,000 yuan to about 1,000 yuan, the least one rider earned 200 yuan by running 9 jobs a day.
Since the ban, riders are most worried about accidents such as illness, red codes and crashes.
From April 2 to 9, Zhang Nian did not eat hot rice or hot dishes, because he lived under the bridge and there was no hot water. There was a pile of bread and bottled water in the car, but he often couldn’t eat it. “The bread is too dry. Zhang Nian said that he had no bowel movements for three days.
Many public toilets have been closed. In the past ten days, they haven't taken a shower or washed their hair. When they wake up in the morning, they wipe their faces with wet tissues.
On April 10, a chain of convenience stores opened their doors, selling bento boxes, hot rice, and hot dishes.
Zhang Nian grabbed the door and bought 3 copies, sat on the doorstep and shoved it into his mouth, eating it all in one go.
Yue Dongchuan said that when running orders outside, they must maintain a negative nucleic acid test certificate within 24 hours. Almost every day, they go to the hospital to spend 40 yuan for the test at their own expense. After the results are uploaded, they will be uploaded to the platform, and they will be checked at the checkpoint at any time.
On April 13, Shanghai ushered in its first rain since the lockdown.
That afternoon, the Shanghai Meteorological Observatory issued a yellow rainstorm warning. Riders such as Zhang Nian, Huang Ming, and Yue Dongchuan did not go out to run the order. They did not bring enough clothes and slept on the concrete floor for a long time, worried that they might get fever and sickness in the rain again, which would affect the running order.
They only have one commercial insurance—the platform deducts 3 yuan in premiums every day, and there is no other guarantee.
Riders' masks are generally blue ordinary masks bought at their own expense. "N95 can't be bought, and it's expensive."
They were even more worried about slipping and crashing the car on rainy days.
Zhang Nian said that it was fine for him to fall and it was inevitable to run orders for a long time, mainly because he was worried about breaking the goods, cars and mobile phones.
In particular, if the goods are broken, they will not only be free, but also compensated.
These days, Zhang Nian often sees riders pushing carts on the side of the road. Either the battery is exhausted or the car is out of order.
The rider's electric vehicle is divided into two types: battery swapping and charging.
You need to go to a car dealership or self-service power exchange cabinet to change the battery.
Since the lockdown, many car dealerships have closed their doors.
Self-service power exchange cabinets are mostly located inside buildings or in urban villages.
The number of power-changing points available is reduced, and the rider estimates the power to take orders.
Huang Ming's car is rechargeable. He found a sanitation station, stuffed a pack of cigarettes with the administrator every day, and charged it there at night.
Some repair shops have reached a tacit agreement with the rider. After the car breaks down, the rider puts the car at the door of the car shop, sends a message and leaves.
After the owner of the car shop repaired it, he put the car at the door and waited for the rider to push it away by himself.
"The biggest idea now is to return to normal as soon as possible." Yue Dongchuan said.
(At the request of the interviewee, Huang Ming, Yue Dongchuan and Zhang Nian are all pseudonyms in the text)
News link: The latest developments in Shanghai rider protection
From April 13th to 17th, "China Youth Daily" continued to pay attention to the security issues such as the difficulty of accommodation for front-line riders in Shanghai, and called for guarantees for this "Shanghai supply guarantee force" through various methods such as internal reference and public reports. Media follow up.
Relevant parties have responded and will actively coordinate.
On the morning of April 19, Zhou Lan, deputy director of the Shanghai Municipal Commission of Commerce, said at a press conference on epidemic prevention and control that riders on e-commerce platforms such as food delivery are an important force in ensuring the supply of living materials in Shanghai. There are nearly 20,000 riders on duty in the city. people.
From now on, all districts will actively do a good job in the management and service guarantee of local delivery personnel, set up a dedicated channel for free nucleic acid testing, and give priority to the issuance of nucleic acid testing reports to provide convenience for riders to take up their jobs.
China Youth Daily, China Youth Daily reporter Geng Xueqing Source: China Youth Daily
April 20, 2022 Version 08