The Efficiency of Laziness

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The Efficiency of Laziness

Outsourcing makes urban living much easier By Yuan Yuan

Electric tricycles zipping through the streets carrying couriers and stuffed with goods have become a common sight in China. This is especially true in urban centers, where the food delivery industry has recently experienced turbo-charged growth.

Behind their curtains, droves of people—cooped up at home or in offices—regularly swipe through apps, placing orders via their computers, tablets and smartphones.

Wei Yanfeng works as a software developer at the Zhongguancun Hi-tech Science Park, an incubator for technology startups in Beijing. Except for daily trips of about an hour each way between home and work, Wei spends very little time outdoors and usually orders three meals online per day.

Every morning, Wei orders breakfast before leaving home, and the food is already on his desk, when he arrives at the office. “My favorite restaurant delivers from 8 a.m., and the whole process takes less than half an hour,” he said.

As for lunch and dinner, various options exist. “Most restaurants near my office offer delivery services,” Wei said. “I have tried the majority of them, and my co-workers always share the discount information available on different food delivery mobile apps.”

Even when Wei works overtime, there are quite a few restaurants offering late night deliveries.

Deng Mei rearranges a wardrobe at a client’s home on May 19

The lazy economy

The “swipe and order” behavior of many young people is facilitating innovative ideas in the service sector. Each day, new startups surface, providing some new service to consumers who seek convenience.

Fed up with restaurant food? We can offer homemade dishes cooked by housewives. Don’t want to queue for a manicure? We can arrange a nail artist to pay a visit. Have no time to collect your visa? We’ll sort it out for you. “Such services can save a lot of time,” Wei noted. “I cannot imagine life without delivery now.”

Deng Mei, 26 years old, set up her own company in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, in 2015, providing wardrobe arrangement services. Working as a babysitter, Deng had discovered that many family wardrobes were a mess, and that people were reluctant to spend the necessary time sorting them out.

Deng was unsure about her business plan at first, but now she is overwhelmed by orders and has had to train more people to help her. “This is very laborious work as we have to shift huge piles of clothes ourselves.” she said. Arranging clothes can help customers (especially women) remake their shopping list. “Sometimes, we forget what we have and make wasteful purchases,”Deng added.

She derives great pleasure from assisting customers by relocating long-lost items while rearranging and tidying wardrobes, which puts customers in a good mood.

In terms of popularity, summer is the high season for the business. “During the summer vacation, quite a few young college students come to us for help in dealing with their wardrobes at home,” Deng said.

“The division of labor is becoming much more specialized,” said Xu Xin, a venture capitalist. “It helps people to focus on what they’re good at, enhancing their professionalism and efficiency.” Xu believes this utilizes under-used capacities in society and matches supply with demand.

Xie Shuying, co-founder of Tubatu.com, a website providing a one-stop interior decoration service, set up her enterprise in 2008 to solve the travails ordinary households have with home refitting. There is a risk of consumers being swindled, since interior decoration involves professional knowledge that few industry outsiders have.

By cooperating with several interior decoration companies, Xie said that they can guarantee a low price and high quality. This has led Tubatu.com to expand its presence across China. “As long as we know where the need is, the market is there,” she explained. “It’s a win-win business.”

Spoilt for choice

“I don’t want to spend time on anything that doesn’t involve intense brain work,” said Zeng Liang, Vice President of Baidu, the world’s larg-est Chinese language search engine. “So I think the market potential for such services will be huge.”

Housework is number one on Zeng’s “don’t-want-to-do” list. “As there are many people who can do housework more professionally than me, why should I bother spending time on it?” he reasoned.

In fact, even “brain work” can be undertaken by artificial intelligence systems. In September 2015, Tencent, one of the largest Internet companies in China, developed an artificial journalist to write simple financial news. Two months later Xinhua News Agency followed Tencent’s example.

The “journalist” that Xinhua used is actually a software application capable of releasing a financial report within seconds after operators input stock data. “Normally it takes about 10 minutes for an editor to finish such work. But with this software, we can produce as many reports as we want. It has largely increased our work efficiency,” said Sa Shuang, a Xinhua editor.

“However, this will not threaten the work of journalists, as many people thought,” said Zhou Jie, an official from Xinhua. “On the contrary, the application can free journalists from typing up routine reports to spend more time and energy on in-depth reporting.”

Zeng desires a robot to help him make good choices efficiently among the plethora of services. “Before, when we wanted to buy a pair of socks, we’d just go to a supermarket,” he said. “But now, when we search on retail websites like Taobao.com, we are presented with a long list of options, and we may spend an hour checking customer reviews to find the best one.”

Zeng suggested that such a situation is exhausting for “l(fā)azy” people. To counter the issue, he said, “Shopping websites should provide smart selection lists based on a customer’s search history, so they’re more likely to see items they will have an interest in.”

Some go even further, such as Vip.com. The fashion and accessory flash sale website claims to offer the optimum price and doesn’t allow customers to search for products. Instead, commodities are simply presented at the supposedly most competitive prices available on the market at different times of the day.

As well as choice and cost, delivery times are another factor to consider. “After people become used to the convenience of purchasing online, they complain about the delivery time, which normally takes two or three days between cities,” said Du Shangbiao, founder of Shansong (literally meaning lightning delivery), which claims to be the fastest delivery service in China.

Thus, according to Du, there is now a boom in same-city fast delivery services. For example, many fresh fruit and vegetable suppliers promise door-to-door delivery within one or two hours. A timer will pop up once the order is placed, with customers being financially refunded if the timer runs out before delivery is completed.

Food deliverymen in Taicang City, Jiangsu Province, take a break from work on July 25, 2015

One side effect

However, a culture of extensive delivery services inevitably has its drawbacks. One of the most pressing is the increase in garbage. Figures from Baidu, Ele.me and Meituan.com, the three largest food delivery service providers in China, show a combined average of 7 million orders daily. If each order used a single plastic bag, the bags consumed in a single day would cover 420,000 square meters, the equivalent of 59 football pitches.

“The rubbish has increased in the past few years with more online shoppers and food orders,” said Jie Lan, a 50-year-old Beijing cleaner. “It causes a big headache since most of the material cannot be recycled.”

Lu Youyou, a student at Beijing Normal University, who sometimes orders meals online, bemoaned the environmental threat posed by the rise of online deliveries. “I feel guilty every time I unpack the food. I would be happy to pay more for environmentally friendly packaging,” he said.

“If convenience comes at the price of our environment, it is definitely not worthwhile,” Lu said. “I hope we can soon figure out a way to balance both convenience and the environment.”

Copyedited by Dominic James Madar

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