The long heat waves in Asia makes its summer much less enjoyable than in North America, but luckily, during the recent summer when I visited China, I rarely had to go out in the boiling temperature for food. It’s much more convenient to simply order a delivery—cold dessert, hot dinner, midnight snacks or anything, and within thirty minutes, it arrives outside the door.

A screen shot from an online food delivery order website www.ele.me

In recent years, food service companies in China realized the advantage of food deliveries and promoted the service to all around China. According to data released by BigData Research, the online food service purchase transactions in China 2016 has reached 176.15 billion RMB, displaying a 361% increase from the previous year (Sohu News). The food and drink industry expands rapidly, allowing restaurants and delivery companies to substantially increase revenues, while customers benefit from the convenience it provides. The expansion of such business appears to have only benefits.

However, the rise of many delivering businesses creates competition, and each individual business tries to win more customers from the limited market by speeding up their service. Cooperate executives make rules that delivery men would receive a significant deduction from their bonus if they fail to deliver within the time limit, which then forces delivery men to take dangerous traffic actions like riding in opposite directions just to save time. In the record released by Nan Jing police station, there has been already 3242 traffic accidents associated with food delivery service in Nan Jing city during the first half of 2017, resulting in 2473 injuries and 3 deaths (Yang Zi Evening News). This high accident rate is an unavoidable result of the cooperation’s draconian requirement.

Delivery Man Working in the Rain

Although a cooperation’s natural responsibility is to satisfy its customers—from whom they make profit—they should also execute their responsibility in protecting their employees.

The decision of business executives to shrink delivery time to promote higher sales may be a decision out of self-interest, but it promotes social interests also for the customers (receiving faster delivery), and the employees (higher sales=more delivery=more bonus) at first. However, as their demand becomes unreasonable, the benefit of the decision (increased sales) is replaced by the cost of the action (employee’s safety). It would be rather selfish of the business cooperation to only think about maintaining sales and profit, while putting employee’s safety at stake, and it would also be a selfish choice of the customers to demand only convenience while ignoring the cost of others.

After all, the business’s primary responsibility is to its’ employees—those who allow them to make profit. Realizing the mistake in their business decision, business executives require some adjustment in the treatment of employees to satisfy customers while ensuring employees’ safety.

References

Sohu News. (2017, January 25). Retrieved from http://www.sohu.com/a/125123776_413086

Yang Zi Evening News. (2017, September 7). Retrieved from http://society.people.com.cn/n1/2017/0907/c1008-29521876.html

[A Delivery Man Working in the Rain]. (2017, September 2). Retrieved from http://cj.sina.com.cn/article/detail/6219520342/385077?column=china&ch=9

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