On a rainy day in November, food delivery worker KX Wu loaded 16 packages of rice bowls, noodles, and bubble tea onto his scooter, balancing some items on the handles, and began going door-to-door in a dense neighborhood in the southern Chinese city of Nanning. Some customers lived in high-rises with elevators, and others in walk-ups. As time went on, Wu grew worried that the customers would complain because the noodles were already cold.
He spent more than an hour delivering to nine different locations. For those deliveries, Wu earned just about 30 yuan ($4.15). Cylindrical roller bearing
To many customers, however, the risk of cold noodles is worth the money saved on “group” orders from China’s leading on-demand delivery company, Meituan. Under the Pinhaofan program (which means “grouping for good meals”), Meituan users place group orders by sharing links with people who live nearby, and enjoy a big discount if two to four people end up ordering the same things together. The goal is to make delivery so cheap that even frugal or low-income buyers could afford frequent orders. “Eat well for 9.9 yuan ($1.4) and no delivery fee,” the program’s tagline reads.
But the program is a headache for delivery workers. They usually need to travel to multiple locations to deliver one group order, and the pay is often not worth it, five current and former workers told Rest of World. By adding to delivery riders’ workload, Meituan is able to offer steep discounts and attract new users in the low-income population, experts said. Workers’ grievances have led to an increase in customer complaints and arguments erupting between drivers and customers.
First introduced in one city in 2020, Meituan has gradually rolled out Pinhaofan across China, hitting almost 5 million orders per day in 2024, according to Chinese business news outlet LatePost.
Its success is another sign of China’s post-Covid-19 thrift economy, as consumers seek discounted goods to counteract the impact of economic uncertainties. On Pinhaofan, users often get meals for under $3 if they join group orders. “They are pretty tasty and very cheap,” Fandara Cao, a 21-year-old engineering major in Ganzhou, Jiangxi province, told Rest of World. Cao has been ordering dinner on Meituan almost every day since she discovered the app’s group-order feature. Her go-to options include a 10.4-yuan ($1.44) wrap-and-congee set and a 7-yuan (97 cents) bubble tea.
Meituan customers spent an average of 48.2 yuan ($6.7) per order in 2021, the last time the company disclosed the data. As the dominant delivery platform, Meituan needs to offer something cheaper if it wants to grow its user base, especially in the lower-income populations, Li Chengdong, head of Chinese tech think tank Haitun, told Rest of World. Having users from the same area order as a group allows each person to save on delivery costs, he said. The rider Wu, for example, was paid 1.8 to 2.5 yuan (25 to 35 cents) for delivering each Pinhaofan meal in late 2023, compared with 5 yuan (69 cents) for a regular order.
Alibaba’s Ele.me, China’s second-biggest delivery platform, has launched a similar group-ordering feature. But Li said it would be hard for Ele.me to compete, given its smaller user base.
Meituan did not respond to a Rest of World request for comment.
Millions of people work for Meituan. Chinese food delivery apps’ evolving algorithms that squeeze workers’ income while making deliveries faster have come under public criticism over the past few years. To earn the highest possible income, workers have to take as many orders as possible, meet all individual deadlines plus earn positive customer reviews.
Riders said they occasionally make good money from Pinhaofan: If people from the same school or office join a group order, workers deliver only to one location. But in many cases, they are picking up from one restaurant and delivering to customers living in different buildings. On social media and in Chinese media reports, riders have spoken of long elevator wait times and sprawling apartment complexes as reasons why they struggle to deliver orders on time.
“The rate was too low,” a 27-year-old former delivery rider from Sichuan province, who requested anonymity for privacy reasons, told Rest of World. “I could accept it if I didn’t have to climb up buildings. The walk-ups were brutal.” The single mother spent three months delivering Pinhaofan orders before quitting.
“It’s a way that the platform as a technological system takes the autonomy away from the workers.”
In 2021, Chinese regulators ordered delivery and ride-hailing platforms to compensate workers fairly. But a subsequent slowdown in economic growth and high youth unemployment have sent a steady supply of young workers to the gig economy, giving platforms little incentive to raise wages, according to Julie Yujie Chen, an assistant professor at the University of Toronto who has studied China’s food delivery industry.
Disputes have erupted between disgruntled delivery workers and price-sensitive consumers. On social network Xiaohongshu and consumer complaint platform Black Cat, Pinhaofan users have complained about delivery workers displaying sour attitudes, arriving too slowly, or refusing to deliver food to their doors. Unlike regular orders, Pinhaofan does not set deadlines for riders and this often leads to longer waiting times.
A Xiaohongshu user posted a chat record showing a delivery rider calling them a “Pin dog” after the user requested the food be brought up to their apartment rather than handed over by the elevator, as the rider intended. A food stall owner in the southern city of Guangzhou told Rest of World that Pinhaofan had brought more business to her small noodle shop, but the “poor attitude” of riders had led to an increase in negative reviews for the shop as well as refund requests.
Chen said that in the past, Chinese delivery workers could choose to take on multiple orders if they found the payment, route, and deadlines acceptable — similar to how batched orders work on Uber Eats and DoorDash. But with the group-order feature, customers and the platform decide which orders should be delivered together. “It’s a way that the platform as a technological system takes the autonomy away from the workers,” Chen said. “[Customers] wouldn’t really think about the decrease in [pay] that would affect workers and, in turn, affect their customer experiences.”
While many delivery workers resent Pinhaofan, Wu said, they order the cheap meals themselves. Wu, who quit his Meituan gig in April, said he understands if the food takes a long time to arrive.
Insert Bearing “We have worked as riders,” Wu said. “So we know how hard it is to deliver Pinhaofan.”