Is convenience and speed getting out of hand?

After living in China for 13 years, there are two key concepts popping up into my mind, when thinking about China: convenience and speed. Talking about western countries, most of my Chinese friends often mention the fact that especially in Europe everything goes so slow, and complain that shops always close so early. In China daily life evolves at a tremendous speed, changes follow each other rapidly, and every week some new trend emerges. Shops are open till late at night which makes life incredible convenient. At every moment of the days simple everything is possible. Everything is at one´s disposal, and more often than not it´s just one click on the smartphone away.

A visitor to the command center for Chinese e-commerce giant JD.com stands near a digital map showing the flow of deliveries across the country in Beijing, China, Saturday, Nov. 11, 2017. [Photo: AP/Ng Han Guan]

That being said, lately I start to wonder whether things are not getting out of hand. Especially the last two to three year I have the impression that things just go too fast. Too much is happening at the same time. Even me, at age 38 still relatively young and tech savvy, smartphone in my hand, have difficulties coping with the speed of modern Chinese life. And convenience might not always be the best solution.

Take for instance Hema, Alibaba´s new supermarket concept. Since the launch my wife especially is an apt user of Hema´s services. Alibaba launched The fresh-food focused Hema an example of the “New Retail” model, which uses technology and data to merge online and offline shopping, offering consumers a more-efficient and more-flexible shopping experience. Hema also provides the unparalleled service of fresh food deliveries in 30 minutes, with each store able to fulfill thousands of orders a day. Alibaba itself claims that customers each make 4.5 purchases a month on average and 50 times a year. On average, online orders account for more than 50% of total orders. A great example indeed of the so acclaimed integration of online and offline in the retail sector. Customers order their fresh food online, and it gets deliver in 30 minutes. 

Short attention span

But has the real quality of life in China improved a lot with concepts like Hema? I dare to argue yes and no. In the old days, when supermarkets were overcrowded and O2O (Online to Offline) sounded more like than a chemical term than a retail concept, our family needed to think about the groceries we needed and plan for the whole week. There was no way we would spend even a minute longer in a supermarket than needed. In those days -I am talking about 5 years ago- supermarkets were to be avoided at all costs because of the noise of screaming staff, smell of fresh seafood and in general an unpleasant shopping experience. And to top it off, we often still needed to rush to an ATM to withdraw cash to pay for the groceries! If I would tell such a supermarket story to my 5 year old daughter, she must be thinking her crazy old man is referring to some kind of life in the dark European Middle Ages. 

Nowadays just looking at the shopping behavior of our own family, roughly speaking -and I agree it´s extremely roughly speaking- it basically comes down to this: the Hema customer attention span for buying groceries and fresh food, has decreased to the bare minimum of blocs of 30 minutes. Whatever is needed in 30 minutes, will be purchased immediately. Whatever is not needed urgently will be postponed to the next bloc of 30 minutes, or later. In my case result is that the Hema courier guys deliver groceries at least once per day at our doorstep, sometimes even twice. But the downside is very obvious. Planning is simply not required anymore. Speed and convenience simply kills any long term planning and thinking. Today and now is important, not what happens tomorrow.

Speed before safety

And what about the increased traffic and consequent safety issues? That seems to be an issue too. China's home delivery boom, powered by an estimated three million couriers, most of them riding quiet electric scooters or boxy three-wheelers, has triggered a surge in road accidents. Media reported that for instance in Nanjing in the first half of 2017, couriers were involved in more than 3,000 accidents, over 90 percent of which were deemed their fault. Chinese cities are also already overcrowded, so daily deliveries at home won´t improve the situation either. It seems that these couriers do not contribute much to the creation of smart cities.

Environmental issues

No doubt all this convenience also creates environmental problems. Online retailers’ endless stream of plastic bags, delivery companies´ cardboard boxes and food delivery companies´ plastic food boxes all create massive waste streams. And people start to take notice. In September of this year a Chinese environmental NGO has sued the country’s three biggest food delivery platforms—Baidu Waimai, Ele.me, and Meituan—over their environmentally harmful practices. The plaintiffs, the Green Volunteer League of Chongqing, allege that the food delivery apps do not let customers easily opt out of disposable utensils such as chopsticks. One delivery company can end up killing 6700 trees from its 13 million orders within one day (in Chinese), the NGO says. And this is just the tip of the iceberg.

So it seems to me, as a neutral observer, that all this focus on convenience and speed, starts to create more long term problems. And one might argue it creates more problems than it really solves. 

(Sven Agten is the CEO Asia Pacific for a German multinational based in China.)