In convenience bees, people are dominated by machines

"The delivery guy is trapped in the system, and people in convenience stores are dominated by machines. We can no longer turn our heads and pretend that these issues are not important. “

Written by Huang Xiaofang

If there is a human-machine game, which side should the decision-makers with the power to choose should prefer?

Zhuang Chenchao, the founder of Convenience Bee, gave the answer as early as 2018, that is, to fully trust the system and let the system determine the life and death of the company.

It's an adventure and a transcendence. In the first three years of the company's birth, the fully automatic business system developed by Convenience Bee showed incredible growth ability, and more than 2,000 stores were opened in three years. Business that does not depend on people, or even gets rid of people, always shines with some kind of charming magic, and it is especially easy to gain the favor and pursuit of capital. Convenience bees are like that.

If there is one sentence to describe the core of the convenience bee system, it is "using algorithms to cover people". Because Zhuang Chenchao does not believe that people have the ability to make high-speed changes in the face of changing environments.

But after a period of fury, the system suddenly hit a wall. Especially in 2022, the weak side of the system cannot be concealed, and about 700 convenience bees have been closed. The once respected algorithm seems to have "failed".

At the same time, there are constant reactions on social platforms that facilitate the alienation of grassroots operators of bees into "robots", who need to completely obey the decisions of the system, and are criticized for lacking basic management, let alone the art and temperature of management.

Because of the byte-growing miracle, algorithms are given some kind of justice in the mobile age. Over the years, however, algorithms have been challenged and questioned.

The delivery guy is trapped in the system, and the people in the convenience store are dominated by machines. We can no longer turn our heads and pretend that these issues are not important.

A day at the mercy of the system

"Dear clerk, you have a pending task, please check."

During the 12 hours that Convenience Bee was working, the clerk Ye Yuxin's ears kept ringing the sound of reminders, if not processed, the PDA (a handheld device) that issued the task would vibrate all the time, and after the specified time, the system would remind again without any emotion, "You have timed out."

Each mission system takes care of all the details. Taking steamed buns as an example, when the system orders 5 buns with cabbage filling, what Ye Yuxin has to do is tell the system to do it according to its instructions.

When she takes the goods, she needs to use the PDA equipped by the convenience bee to scan the QR code on the buns, then enter 5, put them in the smart oven, and then take out the baked buns to take pictures and upload them to the system, and the task is completed. If the buns are broken during this period and need to be discarded, Ye Yuxin also has to scan the code first, tell the system that he has abandoned a few, and then take photos of the broken places and upload them before throwing them away.

Her shop has more than 80 tasks on weekdays and more than 100 on weekends, involving sanitation, steaming buns, hot rice, and sorting shelves. The number of tasks varies from store to store, and Dai Ying, who used to be a store manager at Convenience Bee, said that her store has a maximum of 120 cleaning tasks a day at most.

Each task has a defined duration. Taking cleaning tasks as an example, convenience bees divide them into three types, and large, medium and small cleaning tasks correspond to 15 minutes, 11 minutes and 5 minutes respectively. Many employees told Xinberry Daybreak that the task of convenience stores requires card points, and it is not possible to operate too early or too late. For example, takeout orders in the FF zone (oden, fast food and other fresh food areas) need to rummage for more than 20 seconds to order out-of-stock.

These tasks are placed on night shifts to be more intense and onerous.

Bai Hui became a night shift employee at Convenience Bee late last year. She told Xinberry Daybreak that from 8 p.m. to 8 a.m. the next day, as long as she went to work, the system would continuously deliver various tasks - checking inventory, tallying, inventory, hot buns, cleaning, receiving customers... "Anyway, as soon as you stop, there will be new tasks, I don't have the most tired day, every day is very tired."

At the end of the part-time job, Bai Hui often did not have the strength to eat when she returned home, and fell asleep, and after a month, she lost more than 20 pounds.

Xie Sen, a resident rider who has worked at Convenience Bee, has similar feelings, often so tired that he doesn't want to talk. Unlike other platforms, Convenience Bee's in-store riders, in addition to delivery, also need to pick goods by themselves, do in-store cleaning and replenish smart cabinets.

In 12 hours, he needs to deliver about 50 takeaways, do five to ten cleanings, and replenish five to six containers. Most importantly, these tasks often appear at the same time, sometimes cleaning is being done, takeaway is coming, and delivery must also ensure that the cleaning is completed within the specified time. If there is a mistake, there is a penalty.

While pursuing the overall control of the system, Convenience Bee is also striving to maximize the use of employees' time.

According to the "2021 China Convenience Store Development Report", salary and rent account for about 60% of the cost of convenience stores, as direct sales, convenience bee rent is inevitable, to maximize profits can only compress labor costs.

Li Yan, a former manager of the convenience bee war zone, revealed to Xinberry Daybreak that the staffing of convenience bees is much lower than that of other convenience stores. "The manpower of convenience bees is very dead, the system will divide the store into low, medium and high consumption stores according to the store turnover, usually below 8,000 is considered a low consumption, such a store can only have one person per shift, if the daily consumption is low, the night shift will be closed, and only the day shift will be kept."

It is worth mentioning that the system scheduling does not look at the actual turnover of the store, but the turnover predicted by the system. Usually working a week's shifts at a time, Li Yan is dissatisfied with this system prediction, but can only execute, "(the system) gives as much as it wants, there is no room for negotiation, and the actual situation of the store is not considered at all."

Under surveillance

Anyone who enters the system is controlled by an invisible hand. There is no other way but obey.

Li Yan told Xinberry Daybreak that each convenience bee store has no monitoring dead ends, "there are about a dozen cameras, and there are high-definition cameras at the door and cash register." Bai Hui also provided a message that in order to prevent employees from entrapment, Convenience Bee even installed monitoring in the employee locker room.

One of the functions of these 24-hour cameras is to supervise and direct the daily work of employees.

Bai Hui's job is a product manager, working part-time in convenience bee, one is to earn some extra money, and the other is curious about the algorithm of convenience bee, but her feeling on the first day of work is that "this monitoring AI technology is absolutely malicious" - as long as you stop, this machine will let you work, she made a metaphor, "especially like the overseer who built the Grand Canal in the Sui Dynasty."

In fact, this "overseer" has indeed been given a physical image by the convenience bee. In addition to a dozen fixed cameras, Convenience Bee has also launched a patrol robot - a black machine with its own camera, which can move and take pictures.

Dai Ying revealed that this patrol robot is mainly responsible for checking commodity displays, price tags, etc., and is dispatched at least three times a day, respectively at 10 a.m., 2 p.m. and 6 p.m. every day. It will take pictures of the places that need to be corrected and upload, and the task of the employee will follow, and after the store manager and store staff complete the rectification task, the robot will patrol again to confirm the rectification results of the employees.

Dai Ying was impressed that every week Convenience Bee will have a new display map, and the store manager and store staff need to adjust the shelves accordingly, and the standard for task completion is still judged by robots.

Whether or not to comply with the instructions of the system is the key indicator of convenience bees. Dai Ying told us that the rectification rate of each store will be collected in Beijing, and stores with a rectification rate of the bottom 10% will become the focus of the system's monitoring, and those who fail to rectify will face penalties. "The remote supervision department in the background will pull the data in your store every day, and there will be more punishments and more wages deducted from employees."

In addition to the overtime mentioned above, the display does not meet the requirements, the punishment regulations of convenience bees also include the wrong handling of goods, small portions, expired, unqualified sanitation and cleaning, irregular appearance, etc., once violated is a fine.

Facilitation Bee's penalty SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures) have been increasing. During Li Yan's tenure, Convenience Bee's headquarters held two to three SOP change meetings every week to increase punishment, and by 2022, when he left office, Convenience Bee's punishment SOPs would have reached as many as 1200, "increasing every week".

In addition, the judgment appeal system of convenience bees has gradually shifted from artificial to systematic judgment.

Li Yan said that at the beginning, the various punishments of convenience bees were still human judgments, and the war zone manager ruled that there was enough time to check the monitoring and appeal. However, the system directly determines the punishment and only has 24 hours to appeal.

The most unacceptable punishment rule for Ye Yuxin is that money must also be deducted for leave. Dai Ying, the store manager, said that there is no deduction for taking leave within the limited conditions, such as employees who exceed a certain number of working hours in a week, and store managers occasionally take one day without deduction. "But if you take 2 to 4 days in a row, you will definitely deduct money."

Ye Yuxin didn't understand how to take leave until she left so that she didn't deduct money, and the punishment of convenience bee SOP clerks could not be seen, and only those at the store manager level and above had access to it.

Ye Yuxin originally thought that he could get more than 5,000 yuan, but the punishment for overtime was only more than 2,000. Feeling the gap between this expectation and reality, Bai Hui also expected that she should have six or seven thousand, but only two thousand. The huge gap made her immediately propose to leave, "If you give me a salary on the first day, I will get out on the first day."

The system with the error occurred

Zhuang Chenchao, founder of Convenience Bee, does not believe that people have the ability to make high-speed decisions in the face of changing environments. "When man-machine cooperation, neither man nor system can play to their maximum advantage." So he finally decided: listen to the system completely.

Since 2018, Convenience Bee has changed all aspects of the store, including logistics and factory sectors, to automated operations, driven by accumulated big data algorithms. The algorithm is applied to every link of convenience bee site selection, training, product selection, scheduling, store operation and so on.

Convenience Bee has also developed smart price tags to remind employees to remove expired goods in a timely manner. It can even help employees to look at the store, when there is only one person in the store, if the employee wants to go out to take out the garbage or go to the toilet, you can ask the remote customer service to help look at the store (three times a day), due to the existence of a large number of monitoring, the system can clearly see whether the customer has paid, or need to buy cigarettes, and then interact by shouting the microphone: hello customer, you have not paid; Hello customer, the staff is out, please wait a moment.

Despite this, the system still has bugs and irrationalities. Sometimes, it's the human being who bears the fault for the machine.

Dai Ying told Xinberry Daybreak that algorithm errors are common, after all, the camera has not been able to shoot clearly, and the photo is reflective. Inventory itself also often has problems, such as the commodity inventory is displayed as 3, which is actually 0, but at this time the machine must let you replenish, do not replenish or take different specifications of goods to replenish, are to be deducted.

In addition, the trouble created by the system for employees also includes: sometimes the clock-in positioning at work is clearly turned on, the system will still determine that the positioning is not opened, and the false clock-in will be fined money; When there is no inventory, you must do the action of finding the goods when you know that there is no stock, otherwise you will be deducted.

The outrageous system bug that Xie Sen encountered when delivering food was that the call would go elsewhere than the customer, and "five or six calls in a row, and then suddenly switch to the customer who ordered." Sometimes the system suddenly crashes, and the delivery is not able to pick up the goods.

What made Bai Hui feel aggrieved was that Convenience Bee had not been trained on how to clean the coffee machine, but she was arranged to clean the coffee machine on the second day of work, and in the end she was deducted money because she could not clean it. It is also impossible to consult the old employees, "they don't have time to deal with you, everyone is dominated by the system."

Although employees can occasionally fool the robot's eyes, such as when the inventory is low, use different goods to make up the quantity before and after; Go for a few laps in the shelf area according to a certain law, and you can rest assured that you will not be deducted money when you go out... But for the most part, the system is absolutely unchallenged.

This is related to Zhuang Chenchao's will, he believes that the system is also alive, will also issue wrong instructions, employees can correct system errors, but in the implementation process, employees need to trust the system judgment.

When this will was transmitted to the grassroots level, it turned into many appeals and ineffective feedback, and Li Yan, the manager of the war zone, received the answer when he reported the problem to the program personnel: reduce human intervention.

Dai Ying also said, "The power in the background is relatively large, some punishment appeals will basically not be passed, and the store manager's appeal will not work, and it will need to be solved by the political commissar at the higher level in the war zone."

Convenience bee some customers sued for evidentiary requirements

Over-reliance on the system also makes convenience bees neglect to manage.

During the epidemic last year, Xie Sen was locked in the village for nearly 3 months, and he had explained the situation to the leadership, but the task of replenishment continued to be distributed, and for a long time, dozens of boxes of goods could only be piled up in the store. In his impression, the leaders will not care about this kind of problem in the early stage, and the matter will be solved only when the senior management comes to check the replenishment problem in the later stage.

The repeated ineffective communication made Xie Sen a little disappointed. "Everything has to follow the system, there is no room for buffering and communication." In order to prove his innocence, Xie Sen takes more than 100 photos a day, and the album is full of convenient bee watermark photos he has saved.

There is no service

Convenience Bee executives, including Zhuang Chenchao, believe that every node with people will lead to a decline in overall efficiency. It will also increase management costs, and in his opinion, the only solution is to use algorithms to overwrite people.

His vision is that because business decisions are made by the system, store managers and associates have time to serve and satisfy consumers. The reality is that the time of store assistants and store managers is completely controlled by the system, and the heavy workload makes it difficult for them to have a good attitude to serve customers.

The Black Cat complaint platform shows that the total number of complaints about convenience bees is 1515, which is higher than the number of complaints against Rosen, FamilyMart, and 7-11 combined. Among them, there are many complaints from users about the service attitude of the store, such as the clerk ignoring customers and the poor tone. Due to the oversaturation of work, there have been convenience bee clerks on the Internet recently, and directly sticking a note to let customers not urge.

Bai Hui frankly said that it is difficult to have a service spirit in the environment of convenience bees, and Dai Ying also expressed similar emotions, "The biggest reason why we wear masks is not because of the epidemic, but sometimes the attitude is not good, customers can't see what expression on your face, they won't complain about you."

And when the system is not smart enough, it also indirectly brings a bad experience to customers. For example, employees place goods at will for fear of being deducted, resulting in inconsistencies between the goods and price tags, which in turn affects the customer's shopping experience.

What makes Zhuangchen proud is the automation of the whole process, which has brought about the improvement of employee training efficiency. He once said in a speech in 2019 that it takes about 2 years for 7-11 to train an excellent store manager, but the whole system of convenience bee trains an employee who has no contact with convenience stores at all to become a store manager, which only takes 6 months. A year later, when talking about similar problems again, Zhuang Chenchao shortened the training time for store managers to more than a month.

This automated system objectively does shorten the time for staff training, and many respondents said that they can work by following the operation process, and some even become store managers after two days of training. In areas with an extreme shortage of personnel, Convenience Bee opened a training-free entry this year.

But being able to work does not mean mastery. Ye Yuxin said that he still needs to be brought by the store manager after training, and for customers, the new clerk's unfamiliarity with the system and display will directly lead to a worse consumer experience.

The flip side of employee success is that there is generally no perception of service awareness.

Xinberry Daybreak repeatedly asked the interviewees about the content, and it was difficult for the other party to say the requirements and content of the convenience bee. When asked more, one interviewee simply said that in fact, convenience bees did not have any training, that is, they worked for a day or two for nothing, and "the company does not have many requirements for serving customers."

However, from the perspective of business model, providing friendly service to customers is still an indispensable part of convenience stores.

Toshifumi Reiki, founder of 7-11, wrote in her book The Philosophy of Retail: "A gracious store manager can make it easy for customers to say 'trouble to my home' after shopping at a convenience store – this 'familiar sense of security' goes beyond mere convenience concepts and not only promotes positive consumer behavior, but also strengthens the relationship of trust between the buyer and the seller." And "when the staff in the store are enthusiastic and motivated, the franchise store will naturally attract more customers to the store and generate profits."

Obviously, the business philosophy of convenience bees is completely contrary to this.

The employees are passers-by

While all of Convenience Bee's stores are directly operated, the company doesn't actually own any of the employees in the store.

Not only store staff, but also small and medium-sized management such as war zone managers and store managers of convenience bees are all outsourced. Moreover, the salary of the store manager and the clerk is calculated by the hour, and there is no five insurances and one housing fund.

This means that the connection between the grassroots personnel and the company is very fragile, and employees who are reluctant to do it can lift their feet and walk away at any time. Coupled with severe punishment and intensive work, the mobility of convenience bee employees is high.

Dai Ying's feeling is that it is normal to leave one or two jobs a month; None of the four or five apprentices brought by Xie Sen stayed long, and Bai Hui's experience was even more extreme, and within a month, the first three full-time and two part-time jobs in the store were all gone.

These people initially chose convenience bee because it offered higher hourly wages than the competition, which is challenged in 2022.

After working in Convenience Bee for nearly two years, Xie Sen has long been accustomed to enduring various controls of the system, and the direct reason for his departure is that his salary has become less.

Last year, in his area, the basic hourly wage of delivery workers dropped from 10 yuan to 8 yuan, Xie Sen did not know what was wrong with the company, he only felt that the number of orders was decreasing, the schedule was also decreasing, and many stores simply withdrew takeaways. The wages of riders have also been affected, from about 12,000 yuan per month at the beginning, to 6,000 or 7,000 yuan today.

Some riders chose to leave, and Xie Sen also lost his job because his store withdrew from the takeout section. By the time he left, there were nearly half as few riders in his area as they had been a year earlier.

For employees with a certain level, it is because the company's promise has not been fulfilled.

Before joining the company, the company told Dai Ying that there would be five insurances and one housing fund, and after joining the company, he was told that he would have to wait for half a year. After expiration, the company asked them to change the contract, and it was directly gone. The regional manager also said that when he was promoted, he would let Dai Ying take over his position, and his salary would be raised, but these did not materialize.

Dai Ying is also unacceptable that it is difficult to reimburse the company's normal expenses.

In order to save money, recruitment tasks are sent to store managers. The company stipulates that a certain number of work is issued within one month, and the work number must be under its own store before reimbursement. Dai Ying said that this standard is difficult to meet, and the 90 to 120 yuan per month can only be paid in advance.

In order to maintain the operation of the store, Dai Ying needs to interview about 10 people a day, and the leader's art of drawing cakes is also used by her in the interview process, Dai Ying will tell applicants that after three months, they will have a promotion opportunity, and they can also apply for meal subsidies and housing subsidies. But she said, "There is definitely no such thing, I just draw you bread."

These details accumulate to damage the image of convenience bees' employers, and on various social platforms, many people who have worked in convenience bees mostly say: punish a lot, very tired, not recommended.

stall

Since opening its first store in 2017, Convenience Bee has been accelerating store openings.

By the end of 2020, the number of convenience bee stores exceeded 2,000. In the face of the good situation, at that time, Xue Enyuan, executive director of convenience stores, revealed at the convenience bee supplier conference that the company will start a "high-speed expansion mode" in 2021. According to the plan, the number of convenience bee stores will exceed 4,000 in 2021, and the number of stores will reach 10,000 by 2023, ranking fifth in China's convenience store industry.

The reality is that Convenience Bee's "10,000 Store Plan" has not been realized. According to the "2021 China Convenience Store TOP100" report released by the China Chain Store and Franchise Association, as of the end of 2021, there were 2,800 convenience bee stores, 4,000 that did not reach the target, and were thrown out of the top ten in the industry.

Heading into 2022, the stall of convenience is even more pronounced.

In March last year, Convenience Bee's internal email announced that the year-end bonus was canceled because the performance did not meet expectations, and Li Yan said that in some areas, there will be no year-end bonus in the war zone and store manager since 2019.

Not only the year-end bonus, since 2022, the war zone manager began to change the outsourcing, the five insurances and one housing fund also began to pay the minimum standard, no longer according to the actual salary to pay, the hourly wages of store managers and store staff in Shanghai have also been reduced to varying degrees.

In August last year, Convenience Bee admitted to closing about 700 stores. The official interpretation of the store closure as the result of active choice is a normal excess of the "hibernation plan" - according to the epidemic situation, some stores and supply chains are temporarily "silent" to reduce losses. An industry insider said that in fact, the number of convenience bee stores has closed in the thousands, "Hangzhou has closed more than half, Shanghai more than one-third, and the new stores in preparation have not opened."

But in the eyes of grassroots personnel, the current situation of convenience bees is far more than because of the epidemic. "2020 was still thriving, and 2021 began to decline."

Li Yan said that his previous store, the daily turnover can reach about 20,000 yuan, the surrounding park canteens, Rosen and 7-11 are not opponents. But later, due to changes in the company's system, orders began to become outrageous, "orders under the command of the system became weird, orders with good sales were few, and goods that were not sold well were more." To make matters worse, upward feedback has no results.

The right to speak at the operational level of convenience bees seems to be lost. Li Yan's feeling is that in the past two years, no one has spoken for the operation, and can only passively accept the company's various arrangements, no matter how unreasonable this arrangement is. "The system lacks humanization, many things are too idealistic, and the people who designed it did not go to the store to actually operate it."

The reason for Dai Ying's departure is also related to this, as her first job after graduation, when she first joined the company, Dai Ying operated the store as her own store and did her best. But the various mysterious operations of the system also made her lose her recognition of convenience bees, "once or twice is acceptable, and then it becomes the norm and unbearable."

The warehouse of the store where she is located is not enough storage space, and the goods can only be placed in a corner of the store, but the monitoring sweeps this situation to let her rectify, although Dai Ying explained the reason, but the system still let her rectify again, and will feedback the problem to Dai Ying's superior, the superior can not help, the system will feed back to the city general manager, the general manager's reply is, "No matter what the reason, you must solve it for me."

As a member of the convenience bee, Li Yan's fate is also closely related to the development of the company, due to the company's store closure and layoffs, more than twenty war zones have been merged to only four or five, and some war zone managers have also been demoted to store managers. After working for Convenience Bee for more than two years, he finally chose to leave.

It is undeniable that the algorithm system of convenience bee has indeed improved the existing retail model, and because of this, it once became a "new species" sought after by capital, and Tencent, Hillhouse and other head capital are its investors, and have been rumored to be listed in the United States many times. Now as the company stalls, everything becomes uncertain.

In the middle of 2020, when the management of Convenience Bee was building, someone asked Zhuang Chenchao to make a painting describing the company a few years later, he drew a Möbius ring, an infinite loop of curved surfaces.

In his view, this is exactly what convenience bees are doing, coupling the quantitative world and the physical world, and his ambition is even greater, "this system will not necessarily be just convenience stores in the future," but to achieve real control of the physical world in the digital world.

The reality is that the system is still not granular enough and is being challenged by the physical world.

(At the request of the interviewee, Ye Yuxin, Bai Hui, Dai Ying, Xie Sen, and Li Yan are pseudonyms)