Many friends from Zhang * Fei’s recent one month hair circle of friends marked location, just know that she has left Shanghai, went to the remote Xinjiang work. Sometimes she shares music on her moments at 1 a.m. With the time difference, it’s about 11 p.m. local time.
Around the same time on December 29, 2020, she once again shared a song from netease cloud music on her moments. Half an hour later, on her way home from work, she suddenly fell down with abdominal pain and died after emergency treatment.
Zhang Was born in 1998 and graduated from Xi ‘an University of Posts and Telecommunications majoring in communication engineering. She joined Pinduoduo through university enrollment in July 2019. Before the accident, she was one of more than a dozen employees assigned to the Xinjiang market in pinduoduo’s “Duoduo Buy Vegetables” business.
The 23-year-old employee “suddenly covered her stomach and fainted on the way home with her colleagues,” according to the company’s Jan. 4 statement on the accidental death of Colleague Zhang Fei. My colleague immediately called 120 to urumqi local hospital, after nearly 6 hours of emergency treatment is still invalid, unfortunately passed away… The body was cremated on 3 January “. The statement did not give the cause of Zhang’s death.
Part of the body of the statement posted on Pinduoduo’s official weibo account at 19:45 on January 4.
Part of the body of the statement posted on Pinduoduo’s official weibo account at 19:45 on January 4.
News of Zhang’s death first surfaced on social media platforms at work on the night of Jan. 3, and then spread on social media such as Zhihu and Weibo. This includes complaints about 996, the overtime culture and the squeezing out of employees, as well as “the same in every industry”. On the morning of January 4, under the question “How to deal with the sudden death of pinduoduo employees after working overtime” on Zhihu, an account named “Pinduoduo’s certified official account” commented: “Look at the people at the bottom of the society, who doesn’t trade their lives for money… This is a desperate time. You can choose the days of ease, but you have to choose the consequences of ease…
After 28 seconds, the account deleted the comment. Pinduoduo first denied that the comments were made by the official authorities, and then issued an apology, saying that the content was a “misoperation” caused by employees of pinduoduo’s marketing partner who forgot to log out of the company’s official account due to their personal thoughts.
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A series of pintao more zhihu account around the reversal almost blurred the focus.
A series of pintao more zhihu account around the reversal almost blurred the focus.
But all kinds of controversy and discussion did not stop here — Zhang * Fei had written on his company’s internal account “Guard the frontier for many”. Who was responsible for the sudden death of a 23-year-old employee? Whether from the defects of HR management culture of domestic Internet giants, or the social significance of the current community group buying war, Pinduoduo is falling into an unprecedented crisis of public opinion.
Tuo City: A war of attrition
Pinduoduo launched the fresh food business of community group-buying model in Wuhan in August 2020 under the name of “Buy vegetables with more”. It follows the launch of Meituan in jinan in July of a similar service called “Meituan optimization”, and the launch of didi’s similar service, called “orange heart optimization”, in chengdu in June. In November, Bytedance entered the “vegetable selling” business and chose to test the waters in Chengdu.
Community buying is in full swing. A citizen walks past an e-commerce poster in front of Meituan’s Meituan optimization, pinduoduo’s duoduo grocery store and didi’s orange heart optimization community in tianjin on December 19, 2020.
Community buying is in full swing. A citizen walks past an e-commerce poster in front of Meituan’s Meituan optimization, pinduoduo’s duoduo grocery store and didi’s orange heart optimization community in tianjin on December 19, 2020.
The so-called community group purchase means that the platform first recruits “leaders” in each offline community, who are responsible for recruiting users and collecting orders from users. The platform collects the demand and feeds back the order to the upstream supplier; The pre-ordered items are then promised to be delivered to the leader’s home the next day or the next — these locations are marked as pick-up points on the group purchase platform; In the last step, the user will pick up the goods by himself at the pick-up point, and there will also be a leader in place who will take the initiative to deliver the goods to the door. Shengsheng, founded in Changsha, was the first to use this model to sell fresh produce, and its orders increased threefold year-on-year during the COVID-19 outbreak in early 2020.
Jiang Wei, who lives in Hongguang Yaju community in Urumqi, Xinjiang, also came into contact with community group buying for the first time during the epidemic. Hongguang Yaju is a large community with 5000 families. She started as a volunteer delivering vegetables and express to her neighbors, and gradually developed a WeChat group with nearly 500 people. Then she started a community group-buying business in the group, Posting dozens of product links every night and promising to deliver the goods to her door the next morning. The items come from a small local community group buying App called Bean Sprout.
So far, Duoduo has not managed to squeeze into mature communities like Hongguang Yaju. Before its arrival, there had been several local community group buying brands in Urumqi, such as Tianshan Group, Yuanchuang Youpin, Otter Tongcheng, Han Bean Sprout, Zhi Wei Group, Hexi Xi Life and Le Le Ma. Most of them were inspired by prosperity during the COVID-19 epidemic, and have fostered a group of bao Ma leaders with real community and neighborhood foundation. Most of the thousands of heads of duo Duo grocery in a short time are couples’ shops on the street, as well as “small fronts” for laundry, shoe repair and other services, and even some are delivery companies’ stations.
When the big Internet companies started pouring money into the business, it wasn’t the money they invested, it was the people.
In Changji, Xinjiang province, 30 kilometers from Urumqi, Duoduo Began recruiting leaders in mid-December (the customer-facing side shows “self-picking points”). Within two weeks, with the help of a local local promotion company, it recruited more than 300 self-picking points and announced on December 23 that it would open a group in Changji.
A manager surnamed Zhou at the third-party company told YiMagazine that Duoduo Has been assigned to the team in Urumqi from its Shanghai headquarters and currently employs more than 10 people. Duoduo first announced the opening of its tour group in urumqi on December 1, and now manages more than 2,000 self-raised points. In addition, it has rented five or six warehouses around Urumqi, and the logistics is outsourced to third-party companies, all of which come from local suppliers — mainly wholesalers.
Responsible for the completion of the head recruitment with the ground push company, is the local Marketing Department of Duoduo Buy Vegetables. In addition to the Marketing Department, this group also has procurement, logistics, warehousing departments. Including Zhang * Fei, who died unexpectedly on December 29, these more than 10 pdd employees seem to only do management work, but the docking work between them and all partners involves many links and the work is quite heavy.
“It’s normal for [them] to work late at night, because you have to contact suppliers to organise your supply and you can’t affect the next day’s delivery. Every day the dishes have to be delivered to every pick up point before about 6 p.m.” To push the company official said, a lot of shopping in the local announced the season of kaesong, just before the winter, and significantly increased operating difficulty from weather conditions, the current head of the business communication WeChat group, is of the most complained about the arrival of the goods quality problems, “it’s too cold, bad things hold, many sent to the quality of fruits and vegetables are not too good.”
The staff who buy more vegetables are also in the WeChat group, responsible for communicating directly with the leaders and helping them solve problems at any time.
A person spoke on condition of anonymity community group company of the “first finance and economics” YiMagazine said, including spelling and the mass of a lot of the Internet platform, regardless of its original user coverage in each city, a business to buy dish can access flow, Rio city team will also look for food suppliers, open group head, looking for warehouse, logistics… in the communication, they speak the most, with a third party or in the “flow” – flow reversed transmission chain.
“People can’t move faster than traffic.” Every community group has serious compliance issues, “often out of stock, or quality issues, they have to be dealt with by the staff,” said the front-line worker, who has worked on community group buying in early Extension City. “Everything ends up being customer service.”
According to the employee at the community buying company, the first three months of each new city opening are the most chaotic. Because fresh products are non-standard products, every purchase is a new product, so we need to go through the process of platform review and sales strategy formulation again. At the same time, community group buying is not allowed to stock up. At the moment, it can only communicate with the work on a weekly basis. If the supplier delivers goods that look different from the sample, the warehouse refuses to accept the goods, and the final customer does not receive the ordered goods, the platform must be ready to transfer the goods, or act as customer service to handle the complaint.
The higher the platform traffic, the better the conversion rate, and the greater the business pressure from the derivation to the operating end. Compared with the three platforms of pyeongduo, Meituan and didi, Meituan users are relatively young, didi users have the longest relationship with buying vegetables, and pyeongduo users have the highest degree of compatibility with those who are willing to wait more than one day for cheaper fresh food.
The biggest problem in sourcing, sorting and distribution is not sourcing — each platform can get goods from local wholesale markets — but sorting and logistics. The upstream supplier will generally deliver the goods to the warehouse of the platform, and the user will pick up the goods at the last kilometer. However, there is no ready-made instant delivery service provider for the intermediate logistics from the warehouse to the pick-up point or the leader’s hand.
Competition: Run long distances at the speed of sprints
On the company’s third-quarter earnings call in 2020, Pinduoduo chief strategy Officer David Liu called the supply chain system, which relies on local third-party resources, a “demand-driven” system, and said it “will therefore have a better cost effect.”
But these companies’ use of traffic to drive supply chains is not just a matter of cost, but also a matter of time.
Within half a year, pinduoduo, Meituan and didi had entered almost all of China’s provincial capitals, except for Beijing and Shanghai, which were deemed unsuitable for the diurnal arrival model. The owner of a fruit and vegetable shop in urumqi’s new urban area, who does many grocery shopping, told YiMagazine that Meituan is recruiting a chef to join the team, and the tour is said to have been scheduled for January 8.
The above-mentioned person in charge of the local promotion company revealed that Meituan preferred has set a clear threshold for the performance of the head of the company — to complete an order of at least 150 yuan per week. However, duobuyai has not assigned such a task to the head of the company, and the head of the company’s income is currently 10% of the group purchase order income.
In the speech for the company’s 5th anniversary in October 2020, Pinduoduo founder Huang Zheng talked most about the business of buying more vegetables. The most comment he made on this business was bitter.
“Buying food is a tough business. You pick it up and deliver it while everyone else sleeps, so consumers get fresh food before they have to cook. People have to eat every day, we have to deliver vegetables every day, it is really difficult to do, every day without sleep, the pain here is obvious. It will be more difficult in the future, because if you do a little better, the attacks and slanders from the old forces of various industries and the new competitive situation will come, and the incomprehension of individual consumers will also come. After suffering, it is likely to be thankless, dumb eat coptis, there is bitter, you say bitter is not bitter?”
But Huang said, “Buying vegetables is a touchstone for many people.”
Unfortunately zhang * Fei did not pass this test, she fell in the first quarter of being stationed in Xinjiang.
03 “Strategic business” favored by capital
Pinduoduo’s management team believes the success or failure of its vegetable-buying business is crucial to pinduoduo.
“We’ve reached 731 million users, and it’s inevitable that growth will slow down. But I think we still have some room to expand our user base. Now the bigger issue is our ranking in the minds of users, which is the one we focus on the most, which is why we started the vegetable business.” “Said David Liu, Pinduoduo’s vice president of strategy, in response to a question from analysts on its third-quarter earnings call in late November.
By “annual active users” comparison, Jindo and Ali are already very close – as of the end of the third quarter of 2020, Ali e-commerce in China’s retail market has 757 million annual active consumers, while Jindo has 731 million annual active users, which is only 26 million away from Ali. Ali’s gap is only 26 million.
The so-called “ranking in users’ minds” mentioned by Pindo executives means that users will increasingly think of Pindo first when they want to shop, rather than Alibaba’s Taobao or Tmall. Simply put, it’s all about user activity.
Pindo believes it can achieve this by launching a grocery shopping business. “The AOV (Average Order Value) of these orders is actually relatively low.” David Liu said, but, “Duoduo Buy Grocery addresses users’ daily fresh food needs, so users will use it more frequently and will be more engaged on the platform.”
The main transaction portal for Duoduo Buy Vegetable is based on the WeChat applet, but Poundland has given Duoduo Buy Vegetable a prominent position within its APP application. For every city that opens, local users who open the Poundland app will see subsidized marketing ads for this new business prominently on the home page.
Pindo’s share price has almost doubled since the launch of its grocery business in August. It’s easy to understand why every analyst on the company’s third quarter earnings call asked questions related to grocery shopping.
04 Those young people who want to “run to the big factory”
On the afternoon of January 4, Pindo released a statement about the unexpected death of Pindo colleague Fay Zhang. In addition to the description of Fay Zhang’s accident mentioned at the beginning of the statement, the statement also posted the WeChat friend circle posting of Fay Zhang’s family “begging everyone not to let Fay get involved in the right and wrong of public opinion” and denied the comment on Zhihu that provoked a lot of people’s anger – although some people thought that the comment was just telling the truth, just that people didn’t want to listen to it.
That afternoon, rumors of a “bad” corporate culture at Jindo grew on social media. Later that day, Shanghai’s Changning District Labor Security Supervision Department intervened to launch an inspection of Pindo’s labor employment contracts, hours of employment and other employment conditions.
Poundland’s 2019 annual report shows that the company employs nearly 6,000 people, with an average team age of 27. According to the company’s realized transaction volume (GMV) during the period reached 100.66 billion yuan, meaning that each employee created 170 million yuan of GMV.
As of October 2020, according to the company’s CEO Chen Lei to the public, the size of Poundland’s workforce is close to 7,000 employees. Founder Huang Zheng in the company’s 5th anniversary internal speech, then mentioned the company’s organizational structure adjustments made in 2020 based on the new business of DuoDuo buy vegetables: “We are particularly happy to see that there are much more pals willing and able to fight than I thought in our thousands of people, running to the front line of new businesses such as DuoDuo buy vegetables.”
A number of Pindo employees and sources close to the company confirmed to First Financial YiMagazine that the “running to the front line” in the boss’s mouth is actually an internal forced transfer of employees from Shanghai headquarters to various provinces and cities. This kind of long-term posting does not specify the length of time in advance, and many people are already prepared to move to other cities after completing the expansion of one place. “No one knows when they can go back to Shanghai, but people feel it is a good opportunity to get a quick promotion.” A source told YiMagazine, the first financial newspaper.
“She’s a cheerful, responsible person who occasionally spouts off about overtime in her circle of friends and is supposed to be neglecting her health.” A graduate of the same level who befriended Fay Zhang in the university club told Firstrade YiMagazine that Fay Zhang entered Poundland upon graduation and in the eyes of her classmates was considered to have found a good and enviable job – a “well-known Internet company”, a “high intensity” but also “high pay”.
However, no one knows what the cost is until the accident happens.
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