chinese_fooddelivery.md

Food Delivery in China – Restaurant-Driver Cooperation

As a preliminary remark, food delivery in China is much more dangerous and precarious as compare to the U.S. or Europe. For instance, drivers are give a time-limit in which they must complete the order. Otherwise they do not get the full wage downgrade their ratings and brings sometimes negative consequences to fellow drivers, even if they did nothing wrong. Over the years, these time limits dropped – the system just swallows time without the delivery process being any different. This puts all the duty on the drivers who need to make these high-speed deliveries feasible. Dangerous driving behaviours like exceeding speed limits, running over red lights or driving on the opposite lane is common. It is reported that the latter is sometimes suggested by some company's navigation tool for the drivers.
Needless to say that the death and accident rates among drivers have exploded. Most of them are more concerned about on-time delivery than their health - it is said that the first thing a Chinese delivery driver does after an accident is to check whether the food has been spilt. [0]

Description

Apart from an emerging range of outstanding strategies done by individual drivers [1, 2], there is one collective strategy reported by Yu (2022) [1]. It is collective in the sense that it is a cooperation between restaurants and drivers. Newly opened restaurants cooperate with drivers by playing the role of the customer. They place artificial orders which are then 'delivered' by drivers (no food is prepared or delivered). The benefit for the drivers is that they deliver in time and eventually get a cash bonus (bonus for correctly delivering x orders). Restaurants benefit from that by improving their rankings and scores on the platform. Sun (2019) [2] also reports this tactic and furthermore mentions that sometimes drivers and restaurants share the cash bonus of the driver.

Sources

[0] translation of Chinese magazine Renwu’s investigative reporting on the Chinese delivery service industry
[1] Yu, Z., Treré, E., & Bonini, T. (2022). The emergence of algorithmic solidarity: unveiling mutual aid practices and resistance among Chinese delivery workers. Media International Australia, 183(1), 107-123.
[2] Sun, P. (2019). Your order, their labor: An exploration of algorithms and laboring on food delivery platforms in China. Chinese Journal of Communication, 12(3), 308-323.