No country on Earth is as mad for online shopping as China.
In 2024 consumers there bought 15.5trn yuan ($2.2trn)-
worth of goods online—more than anywhere else in the world.
Chinese e-commerce is ubiquitous, quick and easy.
But that convenience comes at an onerous cost, as Hu Anyan details in his memoir
"I Deliver Parcels in Beijing", a bestseller in China recently translated into English.
To make his desired salary of 7,000 yuan for one month's work—
which in this job meant 26 days—
Mr Hu had to make 270 yuan in each 11-hour shift.
Organising parcels and navigating his trike across his delivery fief eats up two hours.
Mr Hu received around two yuan per parcel,
which meant he had to make one delivery every four minutes for nine hours.
He began to see every minute as a potential half-yuan.
Going to the toilet: one yuan.
Buying and eating lunch: 25 yuan.
He learned to drink less water and skip lunch.
He also learned to plan his delivery routes ruthlessly—an arrangement that slow customers could easily ruin.
When a woman who filled in the wrong address
asked him to make a 30-minute detour to an unfamiliar area where he could easily get lost,
he thinks: "None of this should have been particularly difficult for her to imagine,