Since the beginning of this year, major e-commerce giants such as JD.com, Hema, Meituan, and Sam’s Club have been engaged in fierce competition in the “front warehouse” field. The front warehouse is one of the operational models of fresh e-commerce platforms, generally leasing community storefronts or small warehouses (200~500 square meters), densely built around communities, branding as “30-minute rapid delivery” to meet the parasitic consumption of the affluent petty bourgeoisie and bourgeoisie. The front warehouse model originated around 2015. In 2022, according to data from the China Electronic Commerce Research Center, among more than 4,000 entrants in fresh e-commerce, 4% broke even, 88% incurred losses, 7% suffered massive losses, and only 1% achieved profitability. Once hugely popular, Daily Fresh (每日优鲜) declared bankruptcy in 2022 after burning through 14 billion yuan, marking a failure in capitalist competition. According to the “Instant Retail Industry Development Report (2024)” released by the Ministry of Commerce, the instant retail industry maintained rapid growth, reaching a scale of 650 billion yuan in 2023, a year-on-year increase of 28.89%, and is expected to exceed 2 trillion yuan by 2030. In reality, many cities’ front warehouses are already oversupplied; for example, in Shanghai, LingShou article pointed out that there are currently 400-500 front warehouses, and only 10% of them are needed to cover the entire city. Even as China remains the world’s largest industrial country, its tertiary industry is excessively inflated, revealing the severe decay and abnormal economic structure of Chinese society’s imperialism, embodying the fundamental nature of China as the most rotten capitalist country unable to accommodate more productive forces and hindering the progress of human society. Capitalist society’s accumulation and consumption are antagonistic; the bourgeoisie controls the means of production, does not labor, but can control all products. They recklessly squander the money they have exploited, enjoying parasitic luxury consumption. China’s wealthy petty bourgeoisie and bourgeoisie try every means to step on the working people and live increasingly decadent lives. How exactly does the fresh supermarket model of front warehouses turn a profit? Taking Dingdong Maicai as an example, from 2019 to 2022, Dingdong Maicai recorded net losses of 1.87 billion yuan, 3.18 billion yuan, 6.43 billion yuan, and 807 million yuan respectively. However, from the second half of 2022, Dingdong Maicai achieved seven consecutive quarters of profit. Dingdong Maicai’s profit is precisely achieved by intensifying the exploitation of labor. According to DataVision, the number of riders at a single site dropped sharply from 20 to 7 or 8, and as early as Q4 2021, the average daily delivery orders per rider in Shanghai reached 89.5, far higher than the average of 74.8, forcing each rider to make more trips through 15 buildings every day. In September, a Dingdong Maicai employee suddenly died in a rented house after working multiple consecutive overnight shifts, with his health deteriorating and being threatened by the store manager not to rest. The store manager said, “It’s after 8 o’clock, see if you can go, if not, I have to go.” This shows the exploitation of employees by Dingdong Maicai. Countless sorting workers are drained by working up to 12 hours daily; the large physical workload makes their bodies unable to bear it, and they tremble with fatigue as soon as they stop. This is the secret behind the profitability of “front warehouses”! The decadent life of the parasitic class in society is built on cannibalism! However, in the face of facts, there are extreme reactionary remarks such as “becoming a sorter to lose weight and make money” that are rampant. This is naked glorification of exploitation, turning capitalist exploitation into a good thing for health; in reality, labor under capitalism does little to strengthen the body—“front warehouse” work only leaves workers with occupational diseases or even death. This reflects the parasitic ideology of the current bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie, which seeks to gain without labor, glorifies exploitation, and claims that wage labor is a good thing to reconcile class contradictions. It is worth noting that due to the massive unemployment caused by the parasitic class, workers’ wages and working conditions are extremely poor. People have no choice but to take part-time jobs, such as sorting, to earn the minimum living expenses for themselves and their families. We must overthrow this bloodsucking, cannibalistic capitalist society, establish socialist public ownership of the means of production, eliminate parasitic consumption, and in a socialist society that meets people’s material and cultural needs, free delivery and sorting workers from “overtime” reminders, allowing them to engage in truly meaningful work and study, promoting production development and progress.
https://m.thepaper.cn/newsDetail_forward_29141840 商超集体入局，前置仓打破每日优鲜破产诅咒了？|每日优鲜_新浪财经_新浪网
This front-end warehouse makes me think of same-day and next-day delivery platforms like JD.com. These services are usually not for fresh produce, but they also reflect a distorted economic structure. After all, only by establishing many warehouses and stockpiling a lot of goods in large and medium-sized cities can such quick picking, shipping, and delivery be achieved. Moreover, this same-day and next-day delivery is also accomplished by squeezing workers. If you look at the courier tracking interface, you’ll see many orders being processed late at night in various warehouses, but in reality, such underground hours shouldn’t be considered working hours at all.
This type of warehouse at JD.com often operates around the clock, completely disregarding workers’ health issues.
In ancient times, there was “A骑红尘妃子笑, no one knew it was lychee coming,” and now there are cold chain express warehouses, no one knows it is fresh vegetables coming. Dingdong Maicai, Hema Fresh, these commercial capitalists, in order to satisfy the parasitic luxury consumption of the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie, do not hesitate to waste a large amount of social wealth to build these front warehouses, just to allow them to eat so-called “fresh” food, which fully demonstrates the decadence of contemporary Chinese capitalist society.