Finally resigned from Meituan Waimai

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With the lifting of the epidemic lockdown and the resumption of dine-in meals, the overall economic growth rate has slowed down, which has also led to a slowdown in the food delivery industry. Food delivery has never been very profitable for Meituan, because there is no high growth to tell a story. In order to gain favor from the capital market, it needs to constantly keep its agents rolling up.

In the past, the annual growth rate was over 50%, or even 100%. This year, it may not exceed 20%~30%, which is much better than traditional industries.

Meituan now does not accept new agents, and the big agents merge with the small ones. In addition, the last one is eliminated, which makes the agents feel insecure.

Because food delivery agents face the possibility of being eliminated at any time, they need to make more money in a limited time, so they don’t think about long-term things, such as increasing the points when there is an opportunity, and reducing the wages of riders when there is an opportunity. Because they know that Meituan will not be kind to them, only by making enough money can they survive in the next competition. If they can’t survive, they can still make some money.

This pressure will naturally be transmitted layer by layer to our grassroots agent staff. The first ones to feel the pressure may be the front-line takeaway riders and takeaway salesmen.

Take a look at these annual goals: average delivery cost per rider (that is, reducing the riders’ wages), average deduction rate (increasing the point rate), closed-loop rate (not wanting merchants to deliver by themselves is also a disguised way of increasing the point rate).

Since agents make so much money, they will naturally reduce subsidies to merchants. This will lead to a further slowdown in growth. So Meituan headquarters asked agents to increase investment. Some agents honestly followed Meituan's requirements to subsidize merchants and lost a lot of money. Some chose to pretend to do activities for merchants, and then privately recover the activity expenses (for example: the delivery fee is subsidized by the agent on the surface, and then a part is recovered). The cost of this is that the agent's expenses have not increased, and the merchant's activity expenses have not increased, which is impossible to help the growth rate. In this way, it seems to the headquarters that these agents are already losing money, and there is still no growth. As a result, various tasks are becoming more and more difficult, forcing honest agents to take shortcuts.

This leads to a vicious cycle: the heavier the tasks, the more fraud the subordinates have to do, and the more fraud the subordinates do, the worse the growth rate, and the worse the growth rate, the heavier the tasks. In the end, everything is just a waste of time.

This is the case with Meituan Takeout and its takeout agents. Isn’t it the same between us workers and the agents?

I used to work for the growth of the company, the growth of the merchants, and my salary, a win-win for all three parties. Now I have changed my mindset to how to get merchants to invest more when there is no growth, so that the merchants can make profits and participate in activities.

If you attend the company's internal meetings, you will see that the reduction in merchants' profits and riders' expenses is even more outspoken, quantifiable, and linked to year-end bonuses, and has been like this for two consecutive years. As long as there are not enough people to resist, we can continue to reduce it. If other sister cities can do it, then we can do it too. There is no end.

I used to think that adjusting the locations for merchants would be the end of our business. But it is not. We still cannot allow self-delivery, and we need merchants to make set meals, and we also need to ask merchants to spend money on promotion. If the merchants do not spend money, I will spend 20 yuan on it and go to every merchant to experience it. As a result, the cost of merchants to do promotion has also risen. I am responsible for a merchant whose Meituan takeaway advertising support in the county has reached more than 9,000 a month, which is 4 times his storefront fee.

Because of the fierce competition, there is no time to maintain old merchants, and the task is all on new merchants. There are 900 merchants in a county, and more than 100 are required to go online every month. The bankruptcy rate of such merchants can be imagined.

Anyway, I am very tired. I have done some things that are not of much value to the society. I don't want to be forced to resign after a few years. It is better to resign now when I am young and strong, and choose a better development. Because I can't see much room for development in my previous job, and I just muddle through every day. Even though I have been doing it for so many years, it is not difficult for me to muddle through, but when I think about the future, I have no passion for work. So I resigned and chose a better development. I will take a few days off and see what I can do. As long as I am not starving to death, I will still update this blog.