A few days ago, a friend sent me **, saying that there are many people sleeping in tents for a long time under the bridge hole in the center of a first-tier city. There are also a lot of them on station b, so everyone is interested in searching for them.
I guess it's news during the pandemic. At that time, delivery workers could not work across districts, otherwise they would have to be quarantined, so they bought tents to live in. But look at the ** time is now, it is starting to cool down, how can there be such a thing.
A little bit of understanding, the discovery is not so difficult to understand. Working in a big city center, renting is too expensive and commuting too far, so it's normal to do this.
After some understanding, I found that there is an industry "insider" here, and the delivery person takes orders based on his own positioning, and he must be in this area to receive orders from nearby.
If you want to take more orders and the cost is high, it is natural to be in a place with dense business districts. And the delivery staff have different positions, some specialize in long-distance orders, some always pick up several short distances at the same time, and some like to do supper. Now there are more and more takeaways, and the unit price and volume are declining rapidly. Only delay the working time, especially at night when the list competition is less, and there are often long-distance ** lists, may do a few large votes, which is equivalent to running a day during the day, the problem is that it is relatively cold, and the risk factor is slightly higher when it is dark.
But in this kind of place, the rent is also very expensive, and most of them are beyond the capacity of the delivery person. If you commute back and forth every day, there will be no time to rest.
Just buy a tent, which is equivalent to squatting in the city center 24 hours a day, and some delivery people are lying in the tent and swiping orders, if there is a good one, it will be sent again.
But I have the impression that the situation of the courier is different, although it is also hard, but there is also a working time.
It just so happens that a little friend who often talks about it has been doing express delivery for many years, so I learned about the situation with him and told you about it.
The reason why it is difficult to do express delivery is simple: like most problems in the world, it is a problem of money.
In the past 10 years, the unit price of express delivery has been falling, basically not looking back, and has fallen by nearly half so far.
The reduction of unit price makes profits thinner and thinner, and if you want to make money, you can only try your best to reduce costs, causing pressure on the entire industry. Express delivery is a labor-intensive enterprise, and the cost of personnel is the majority. People on a line, from receiving, sorting, transporting to the final delivery, everyone has to go crazy involution. If you want to maintain your income, you can only increase your workload in proportion.
For example, if you originally earned 1 yuan per order, but now you earn 5 cents, and if you want to maintain your income, you have to double the workload. We need to increase the working hours and reduce the processing time of each order.
I searched the reports of major domestic express delivery companies.
My little friend took a look at it and said with a smile that it is not so miserable, and the actual situation of the industry may be a little better. But it's not going any better, because the unit price is indeed continuing to decrease, which has made everyone very stressed.
Taking his second-tier city as an example, he calculated an account for me: an ordinary express delivery, receiving mail in 2-25 yuan, send in 1-1$2.
In order to improve efficiency, most of the express delivery is now sent to the post station and other collection points, and the post station will charge about 5 cents, which is deducted from the courier's delivery income. So the courier delivers a single order, and there is only 5-7 gross income.
For large and fragile goods, the express delivery cost is naturally relatively high, and a single order can top several small items. However, the cost of the post station is high, and customers may complain if they don't pick up the parcel well and take it home, so most of the time it will be delivered to the door.
The normal workload of local couriers is to deliver an average of 200-300 orders a day and receive 30-50 items. Deduct the insurance you bought, the fine you complained about, and the compensation for loss and damage. In the end, I was busy every day, and I earned about 200 yuan. Five or six thousand dollars a month.
This income seems to be okay, but it is very difficult behind the scenes, with an average of more than 10 hours of work per day, many of which are manual labor. If calculated on an hourly basis, it is similar to a part-time job at a convenience store. In addition, you have to receive a large number of **, especially **, most of which are reminders and complaints, which are very internal friction.
The main reason for such a low unit price is that for many years, the competition in the express delivery industry is mainly "volume", especially for customers with large orders, and the express companies have basically hit the best to the extreme.
Friends, you may think it is strange that sending a courier by yourself starts at 8 yuan and 10 yuan, which is much worse than more than 2 yuan above.
This is because ordinary people send mail is a kind of **, which is a completely different set of ways for business customers.
Their courier ** is very low, otherwise there are so many 9 on the Internet9. Free shipping.
Courier companies continue to reduce prices for customers, and customers are happy to do so. There are some savvy customers, and the amount of a single customer is not large enough, so a group of customers sign a contract. Form an alliance, such as how much is a single order for all non-remote areas, 2 yuan and 3 yuan.
What's even more ruthless is that there is a kind of charter warehouse, which packages the entire daily capacity of the two places.
The best source is the kind of all small pieces, which is a plastic bag of data cables, earphones, trinkets or something, light and small, free shipping under 10 yuan. The unit price of this kind can even hit below 1 yuan.
Anyway, I tried every means to reduce the unit price, and now it has dropped to an outrageous point, but there is no way, no matter how low it is, someone still does it.
In the express delivery industry, everyone does not understand a little bit, such a business, the industry is not very profitable, and we all know that it is not profitable. But there are always newcomers jumping inside, and they are all jumping very hard.
Every time one jumps in, it will naturally squeeze out a part of the original market. The way to quickly occupy the market, everyone understands, is to reduce the unit price.
Later, when I looked at the catering industry, I was immediately relieved that the profitability of the catering industry would not be much stronger than that of the big "Myanmar A", but it was still going forward.
For example, the craziest "level rabbit entering the game" in the eyes of the old courier.
Since 2019, Grade Rabbit has obtained access permits through mergers and acquisitions, entered the domestic market, first cooperated with other companies, and began to work alone when the environment was clarified.
The slogan of the rabbit back then was to lose 100 billion first, and fight to the end. If you lose one dollar per order, you will work for three years first, and then three years if you can't do it. At that time, in addition to the rabbit of the domestic express delivery, only SF Express and Jingdong will be left, and the others will be washed and slept, and even the soup will not be given to you to drink.
Under the low-price mode, many express customers immediately began to lose, and there were three words when asked - "de-grade rabbit". As the number of customers increases, there are more and more orders on the level rabbit side, and there are fewer and fewer orders for others.
I have also seen the propaganda of the level rabbit**, introducing the expansion speed and method of the level rabbit, and the ultimate behavior in Yiwu Commodity City. ** was beaten to a single 8 cents, and the merchants were crazy and smashed the order.
This method is really incomprehensible in the eyes of industry insiders, and the only explanation is the so-called "Internet thinking" back then, which first lost money to expand, and then occupied the market and then raised prices. There are also experts who come out of the platform to introduce the rationality of the rabbit strategy. And predicted that three years later, there will be only three companies in the national express delivery industry: low-cost ordinary orders (grade rabbits), * high-quality service orders (SF), and self-operated logistics orders (Jingdong).
But many people do not agree with this statement, this kind of ** war is impossible to fight forever, and it has no real meaning. Sooner or later, it will return to the normal ** range, and I don't believe that the rabbit is really so arrogant that it will take out 100 billion to smash the market.
The next thing is similar to what everyone judged, and the level rabbit gradually lost its stamina. But with such a mix, the unit price has really dropped, and there is no sign of rising.
Therefore, the industry does not think that the rabbit is a spoiler, since 2012 in the opening of the first war, although the express delivery industry has been shouting "do not fight the first service", but still fight the unit price, in the end no one got a good good.
Nowadays, people in the industry have formed a path dependence, and if the business volume does not go up, they will think of lowering the price, and if they can't press it down, they will reduce the cost, and if they can't shrink, they will increase the amount of tasks. In the end, it is to squeeze out the room for price reduction.
As a result, the working hours of couriers are getting longer and longer, the service time of each order is getting shorter and shorter, and the service quality is becoming more and more perfunctory. Even so, incomes inevitably fall. The pressure is more and more transmitted to the grassroots level, and the ultimate is to finally live under the bridge and hole in the city. But whether this can be called life, I dare not draw conclusions.
As for how the unit price was suppressed like this, the industry can't say. "Anyway, if you don't do it, some people will do it, China just has no shortage of cheap people, and there is no shortage of cheap companies, and it seems that there will always be cheaper **.
I also learned a lot about the daily life of a courier.
Every day at 6 o'clock, they have come to the express station and start unloading. It is to get the express off the car, and at the same time carry out a rough division, which takes more than an hour.
Then there is subdivision, where each person separates his or her own area of responsibility. Everyone divided the pieces they wanted to send today according to the plan, and loaded them after they were divided, which took more than an hour. The general express car officially departed, and it was already around 9 o'clock.
This began the morning delivery work, running from community to community, and if there is an appointment to send, it will be dropped by or turned over to get it. In the morning, if the pressure is not too high, I will return to the express station around 12 o'clock. Have lunch, pick up the items to be delivered in the afternoon, and put down the courier that you received in the morning.
If there is a lot of work, buy something and eat it on the side of the road. Then I stopped by the station to get the afternoon piece, and I didn't even have a chance to catch my breath.
And these can be successfully completed, very dependent on the proficiency of the courier, the express is also divided into masters and not very good, the masters have a good memory, know who has people all year round, who directly put the express cabinet. Take less unjust roads, less unjust buildings, and the gap will be big at the end of the day. This also determines that when a certain courier is sick, his pile of couriers will immediately be backlogged, and his work is often unaffordable for others.
The delivery time in the afternoon is not necessarily, sometimes it is busy at four or five o'clock, and sometimes it is ten o'clock or even 12 o'clock at night. The completion rate of the same day is at least 90%, and you will be penalized if you fail to deliver it on the same day.
Back at the express station, the delivery is not finished. Then there is the recording of work, the confirmation of various information, and the handling of complaints. The so-called handling is just a nice way to say, and it basically informs you of the penalty. Some couriers are really not the material to do this business, there are too many lost items and complaints, and the fine is more than the salary in a month, but they owe the company money, pay back the money from the part-time job, and run away with the bucket in a few months.
The work of the sorting station is relatively less complicated, the weather is not bad, there is no need to go out, there is no pressure of traffic safety, and there are no complaints. If there are not enough people, go to the labor market to recruit people, often 80-200 yuan a day, this income is related to hand speed, the master sorts more than 2,000 couriers in one night, and ordinary players may only have seven or eight hundred. This is also a heavy physical work, walking 40,000 steps in one night, often going to the labor market in the morning to recruit a group, and the next day less than half.
It is also strange to say that in 2010, the revenue of the express delivery industry was 57 billion, and now it is 900 billion, and the overall scale has swelled nearly 20 times. Now everyone says that it is not easy to mix, but it can only be said that the number of people who have poured in has increased by more than 20 times, and everyone has earned less.
In fact, for the little brother who has worked on construction sites and electronics factories, express delivery and takeaway are definitely much stronger than electronics factories. I talked to many readers, and they all said that they would not return to the factory if they died, and they could not do the work in the factory, and they could not stand the physical pressure.
However, another surprise is that there are many people who are very comfortable with the work of the factory and do not want to come out at all. They can do those tasks mechanically for ten hours as if they were asleep, and they don't feel tired at all, do you think it's a talent?
And I found that their express delivery generally yearns to drive online car-hailing, especially envy the special car, the most envious of those who drive GL8, thinking that they can earn one or two hundred per order.
This is strange to me because I have heard them say this more than ten times. However, it is really difficult to get the equipment for a special car, you need to have a driver's license, and you also need to have a car. Most people are not too confident in their car skills, and they are worried that they will not be able to earn back the rental car money when renting a car, so they are still ready to save money to buy a car. There are also some who want to save money to buy a Wuling Hongguang to run transportation, and live in the car at night, even saving money for rent.
Writing here, there may be friends who think they must be very bitter, in fact, I got a deep feeling from the people I contacted:
Whether it is bitter or not, the key is whether you get married and have children.
If you are not married, the saying on the rivers and lakes is: You can't spend 3,000 a month. Pinduoduo + Kuaishou + Shaxian Hotel, cool flying.
The most expensive thing is to live, single in the suburbs or urban villages, rent a room that does not pay attention to conditions, can put down a bed and a few suitcases, ** is not high. Generally, a ten-square-meter house in Majuqiao, Beijing, needs about 1,000 a month, and if there is only one bed, then 300 is enough.
The cost of eating, under the large-scale production capacity of modern industry, as long as it does not pursue the added value of status, is really not expensive. On weekdays, relying on the food of Shaxian Hotel, Lanzhou beef noodles, and yellow stewed chicken, it is very simple to meet the needs of daily life, and it does not cost a few dollars.
If you want to improve your food, go to a restaurant to stir-fry a dish alone, or buy some cooked food and go back to the house, with wine and a mobile phone, it will be cool to death. There are such bloggers on Douyin B station, flower pig's head meat with beer, eating while playing games, anyone who sees it has to envy.
As for a few friends or colleagues eating together, chatting and bragging at the table, it can be regarded as a top enjoyment.
It's even simpler when it comes to entertainment. The world's standard mass entertainment method: brushing, watching live broadcasts and online shopping, almost no cost can meet everyone's needs.
The so-called first watch food bloggers get off work, from the Manchu and Han banquets to the fried grasshoppers. After eating, I watched the live broadcast and brought the goods, and I didn't want to buy it, so I watched it as a talk show. Lie down and look at the young lady, with long legs and long black straight coswear. If you can't sleep, you can brush up on handicrafts, from dismantling planes, repairing horses' hooves to washing carpets. There may be friends who don't understand what is beautiful about washing carpets, so you can just take a look.
However, there is a premise for all of the above, that is, if you are not married, the logic will change when you get married.
Once you get married and start a family, all kinds of pressures will be on your body. Not only do you have to take out the money to support your family, but you also have to save some of it for emergencies.
Of course, this is only the beginning, and the later costs are huge.
The most important thing must be housing, after all, it is difficult to get married without a house, and if you buy a house, you have to repay the mortgage, and you owe the bank a sum of money every day when you open your eyes.
When I have a child, this is another huge investment of money and energy. Once the child becomes a dragon, the burden of the child is even greater than the house, and there will be a sense of despair, afraid that his family will do this for three generations. No, there was a news some time ago, a family of five in Beijing delivered takeaways, and it was accompanied by a very terrifying sentence, "self-replication of social classes":
In the past, no one thought about this kind of problem, and when they reached the age, they got married. In the past few years, these things have been spread everywhere, so that many young people have even completely lost the desire to get married, and even if they get married, they don't want children.
Many of the young couriers I've known over the years are at two extremes: either they're married early enough to have children, or they're not getting married at all.
In the past few years, almost everyone has been paying attention to college students graduating without getting married and having children, and I think the most troublesome thing is that the express delivery class gives up childbirth, which has a great impact on the future.
Epilogue:
I'm not going to write about it, but I don't actually want to write about it as a grievance conference, especially now that few industries say that they are very relaxed, they really don't.
But I do want to be humanized slowly, and of course, the essence of many questions is a question of "who bears the cost". If the income of the express delivery is increased, it is likely that the consumer will bear it, for example, if the express delivery fee is two cents more per express, the courier's income will be much better, and it will not be rolled up like this. But you say that there will be a large-scale influx of people from other industries to express delivery and pull down wages, I think it is also possible.
I believe that many people support the improvement of the express delivery and takeaway ecology, after all, express delivery, takeaway, online car-hailing, and self-delivery are the four mainstream channels of flexible employment.
In fact, most of them can't do it since **, and they have done the first three. Who doesn't want their back road to be a little smoother, to give others a way, is to give themselves a way.