On a normal weekday, standing on the busy streets of Huaqiangbei, I turned on my mobile phone to searchOnline ride-hailingThe price of From the current location to the container warehouse 21 kilometers away, the online car-hailing special discount is 48 yuan, and the quotation given on the page of an online freight platform is 42 yuan.
The prosperity of Huaqiangbei began at 4 a.m., and Master Qiu, who has been running goods in Shenzhen for 5 years, said that he has been working for nearly 8 hours continuously from morning to now, and only two-thirds of the day has passed.
For drivers like Master Qiu, the working hours are almost fixed and unchanged every day.
“I say 8-hour work every day, if I really work 8 hours, I would have starved to death.” When asked about income, Master Qiu said frankly: “The freight rate is low, and the money can’t run out.” In addition to the basic daily expenses, Master Qiu also needs to pay the monthly loan to buy a car, his children go to school, and the family’s living expenses…… The car was rented, and as soon as I opened my eyes, I owed the car dealer more than a hundred, and I thought that the freight could be freer, but the invisible shackles were trapping people.
In the Huaqiangbei business district, there are cargo drivers waiting for orders everywhere on the side of the road. They are like red blood cells in the city, shuttling through the streets and alleys of the urban system. In 2024, the total amount of social logistics will exceed 360 trillion yuan, but in recent years”Low freight rates” and “low profits”It has become a loud cry of drivers in the freight industry, and social media is also full of complaints from freight drivers, and this phenomenon is intensifying.
In the early days, in order to grab limited drivers and expand the resource base, freight platforms have “burned money” subsidies to attract drivers to settle in and obtain customers. It is understood that Lala’s initial momentum was to provide cash rewards and new incentive support. According to the prospectus, more than 60% of users recognized the Lalala brand for the first time through car stickers, which has become the promotion method with the highest brand penetration rate.
During the trial operation stage, Didi Cargo launched a generous subsidy policy for drivers and cargo owners. There are two main types of subsidies for drivers: one is the daily tiered order reward (for example, the first order is 50 yuan, the second order is 60 yuan, and the third order is 80 yuan); The second is online subsidies in core areas, as long as the vehicle stays in the designated area, even if it does not receive an order, it can also receive subsidies. At that time, in order to reduce the outflow of drivers, Lalala also greatly increased the order reward for drivers. In 2020, Lala launched the “100 million yuan carnival Golden Autumn Festival” in September 2020 to issue subsidies to drivers and users to fight against Didi’s entry. Different from the Lalala platform, Kuaigou Taxi is an enterprise incubated by 58.com, which has unique advantages in driver clues and is developing rapidly.
After the provincial government joins the bureau, new drivers will be rewarded with 50 yuan for their first order, and old drivers will receive an additional 2,000–3,000 yuan per month. In addition, the deposit will be lowered, and the driver’s deposit will be reduced from the industry’s common 400-1,000 yuan to 300 yuan in 2024.
Although the major platforms are pouring money to attract sources, they cannot escape the essence of profit-seeking. To this day, there are still drivers who recall and lament that when Didi competed with Uber, they would directly throw money to compensate the driver. Looking back now, it is more like the last carnival of the development of the industry.
The dilemma of one-yuan freight, the vicious circle of overcapacity and low-priced orders
Once the commodity falls into the stage of scale, under the premise of diluting production, cost reduction becomes inevitable. According to statistics, as of June 2024, the number of registered users (monthly active users) of Lalala is 13.5 million, and the integrated capacity of the national online freight platform exceeds 10 million vehicles. 1.5 million drivers compete for < 1.5 million daily single freight, the market of “wolves more meat and less meat” continues to develop abnormally, but also spawns a series of negative effects, overcapacity is on the one hand, no stable supply is on the other hand, most drivers only have a unilateral supply of goods, individual drivers because there is no stable supply of goods, orders, so the delivery time is uneven, and people who drive 10 hours or more a day account for a large proportion. The driver’s blood supply is insufficient and faces the survival challenge of “1 yuan freight” brought about by the proliferation of low-price orders.
What is a low price order? To put it simply, “low price orders” and “special offer orders” are essentially a kind of behavior of “drivers make profits and users benefit”, which is a fixed price order launched by the platform to attract customers. In this case, can you enjoy the normal price service at a low price? Can the air conditioner be turned on? Does the driver have to bear the burden of moving? Because of the vague service standards under meager profits, conflicts of interest between drivers and passengers also occur from time to time.
Taking the Lalala platform as an example, there are generally three types of car ownership, pure car rental, rental purchase/monthly payment car and full car. For these three groups, no matter what kind of car it is, the driver who receives the low price order is “tasteless and a pity to abandon it”. Although he knew that he couldn’t make money, the list was rare, “when the wheels stopped, the banknotes froze”, and the driver could only go on the road.
Through interviews with several freight drivers in the Huaqiangbei business district, we learned that the price of small trucks in third- and fourth-tier cities in Guangdong is 1.7-1.8 yuan/km, and the small goods order from Guangzhou Baiyun to Shenzhen can be allocated to 2.2 yuan/km; Under normal circumstances, the platform price is generally 1.8-1.9 yuan/km, but after deducting 13%-15% commission, the driver gets only 1.6-1.7 yuan/km, and the profit is extremely low.
In addition to the shrinkage of freight rates, there is also a situation where large vehicles receive small orders, for example: 4.2-meter cars are priced at 3.8 meters and then discounted by 70%, and the driver only gets a unit price close to “1 yuan”.
In addition to the “1 yuan” unit price, we also need to consider that Lalala not only has a procedure for pulling goods, but also has an additional labor process for loading and unloading, and most of these labors have become default gift services in the low price list, which can be said to seriously damage the interests of drivers. The driver, Master Lin, said that it is conservatively estimated that the low price order makes him earn 50-150 yuan less a day.
The industry is competing with each other, and it is a reality to bend the waist with five buckets of rice
In fact, in the major freight platforms and urban distribution logistics, the common models are mostly micro-noodles, which will not be preferred by customers due to higher prices, so the different models have pre-differentiated revenue priorities from the beginning.
In the face of the flood of low-price orders in the homomorphic competition, Master Qiu, who is also a platform freight driver, couldn’t help but vomit: “Even if the driver can’t see the price, he will grab it in seconds, and the bottom line is not low, so it’s strange.” It’s all your own reasons, or you don’t unite enough. “There are differences among peers, and such topics are also a point in the media, each with its own difficulties.
According to the survey, the age range of drivers in the freight industry is between 36-45 years old, for drivers in this age group, the average age of parents is more than 60 years old, and the children are in the compulsory education stage, and they are already in the life of “Peak period of responsibilityThe cost of trial and error is too high, and they dare not change careers easily. When in the prisoner’s predicament, you can only give priority to survival, and “betrayal” has become helpless, and “you don’t do more than others” has become the norm of discipline, and finally fall into the quagmire of collective survival.
However, there is not only one dilemma faced by drivers, the urban heat map has to be stared at, the intercity congested road section must also be familiar with the heart, and the insurance bundling methods are endless, last year it was still 7,000 insurance, and this year it is as low as 8,000. According to Master Lin, he was ordered three times a month, and the car payment was rejected by the cargo owner for various reasons, although the platform paid 90% in advance, but this kind of loophole behavior still occurs from time to time. “This is a very unfair decision.The punishment for the user is not painful, but only restricts him from placing orders, and the rights and interests of our drivers are not taken seriously at all。“
In order to maintain a stable income, many drivers also choose to go organized. After occupying the regional high ground in the planned logistics market, retail investors cannot compete toughly by going it alone, and freight rates are rolled up and lower……
On the one hand, the platform faces the overwhelming preferential and special pop-up advertisements of users, and on the other hand, it is the layers of exploitative “concessions” for drivers, perhaps sacrificing the interests of drivers in the short term is a shortcut for the platform to choose barbaric growth, but the platform wants it both, and the balance between first-hand users and first-hand drivers is difficult to achieve.
Freight rates are not numbers, but thermometers for the industry
Freight rates are not just a number, but reflect the balance between supply and demand in the freight market in real time. It is both a tool for technology to improve efficiency and the cost of capital and policy imbalances. According to public data, the Lalala platform alone has achieved the transportation data of 16.7 million merchants and 1.7 million drivers per month, and the huge number of drivers is active on the trunk lines of large and small cities, and the freight rate has become the thermometer of the industry. It can also be said that the survival state of drivers also indirectly reflects the vitality of a country’s manufacturing industry, but drivers, as the end of the industrial chain, have the weakest bargaining power and are passive everywhere.
Freight rates continue to fall, and some people call on drivers to save themselves, but is it feasible?
Some experts suggest that drivers obtain cold chain transportation and dangerous goods transportation qualifications, undertake high value-added goods, and establish their own advantages in subdivided transportation scenarios, which sounds feasible, but for drivers who survive under the urgent catch-up of the last elimination law, it is more like talking on paper. More than 38 million truck drivers across the country are running out of the economy on wheels, and the freight industry is “eating meat”, but drivers can only “drink soup”. According to official data, the number of freight drivers in our country has dropped from 30 million at the high point to 17 million today, and more drivers have chosen to flee the freight industry under the squeeze of living space.
The ultimate weight reduction of scientific and technological progress is to make technology hidden in the dust, but it should not let the driver holding the steering wheel become a forgotten footnote in the transformation of the times.
