Recently, the popularity of the Meituan Group has been a bit high. Some time ago, Wang Lin, deputy director of the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Human Resources and Social Security, ran a day-long US group takeaway. "Complaining" said, "I worked for 12 hours a day, delivered 5 orders, and earned 41 yuan. This money is too hard to earn." Recently, Director Wang took the inspection team to have a dialogue with representatives of Meituan Company.

During the dialogue, we noticed that the representative of Meituan said that there are nearly 11 million registered takeout agents on Meituan's platform at present, and the relationship with Meituan only belongs to outsourcing. The commercial insurance for 3 yuan/Day is still deducted from the rider's commission, and if there is any problem with the subsequent rider, it will be borne by the commercial insurance. It is not difficult to see that the US Mission has already cleared its responsibility for this close to 11 million riders. But in fact, the "squeezing" of the rider by the US Mission may not be all that.

Not long ago, a doctor from Peking University also revealed an experience that he once ran a takeaway period. The doctor of Peking University spent five months investigating. At the beginning, the doctor sincerely praised the achievements of platform management of hundreds of thousands of riders. However, as the delivery time gradually increased, the doctor also found some problems. The core of the problem is that the platform not only improves efficiency through big data algorithms, but also tries to "squeeze" the "surplus value" of takeaway riders.

Does the takeaway platform "squeeze" riders through big data?

According to the Peking University doctor, the take-away platform has mastered a large amount of data, and then the data is used to plan the time for the take-away staff to pick up and deliver meals, and to price each order. Such a huge amount of data is naturally inseparable from a system with accurate algorithms, so that all details can be calculated, and then the purpose of high control and accurate prediction can be achieved.

Simply put, the platform relies on big data to help riders take orders, but the question is, is the platform really just so kind? After all, the platform is for profit, which means that the behavior of the platform to continuously improve the efficiency of riders is not only to make riders earn more money, but more importantly, to make their own pockets swell.

in order to achieve this goal, the platform naturally carries out some so-called "optimization" on the algorithm. According to Dr. Peking University, "takeaway platforms are never satisfied with the compressed delivery time, and they are always testing people's limits." And also gave an example.

In the past, take-away riders had to go to the Zhixing apartment building of the National People's Congress to deliver take-away, so the system calculated the delivery time based on the north gate, which took about 4 minutes. However, then some riders made a shortcut, so that the delivery time of this order became more plentiful. Therefore, the rider will use the time saved to run the next order. However, after many riders did this, the platform actually shortened the order time accordingly, just like "patching the BUG."

judging from this wave of operation, it is really unacceptable that big data, as the initial product of facilitating users and improving riders' efficiency, has finally become a tool for the platform to "squeeze" riders' "surplus value". Of course, the technology itself is not guilty. The key is to see what the enterprise or platform that uses this technology is for. If it is "falling into the eyes of money", then it is naturally the riders and merchants on the platform who are hurt.

Big data also has an impact on the platform draw ratio

In fact, the platform not only "squeezes" riders through big data, but also continuously analyzes the draw ratio through related algorithms. For example, the US group's take-out was frequently protested by merchants some time ago. Last year, Guangdong Food and Beverage Association issued a document accusing Meituan of "high commission" behavior and holding 18% commission for large chain restaurants; About 23% for small catering.

In the eyes of outsiders, the commission of about 21% may not be high, but catering itself is a small-profit industry. Unless you set the unit price of customers very high, consumers are not fools. Once the price is too high, the traffic will naturally drop. But "the wool is on the sheep's body", if the merchants do not rely on price increases to fill the vacancy of high commission, then the only way is to reduce the cost, otherwise who will lose money in business?

And big data does play a decisive role in the scale of platform formulation. After all, this commission is by no means determined by patting the forehead, but based on the analysis of big data. According to a big shot in Zhihu, this drawing is actually calculated according to the algorithm of "Meituan Brain". The "Meituan Brain" is a knowledge map of catering and entertainment built by Meituan, which can realize more intelligent operation through artificial intelligence combined with scientific calculation of big data.

In addition, the drawing ratio will be updated with time and data iteration. However, there is a problem worth discussing here. Although big data can help the platform solve the problem of extraction and formulation, it is entirely from the perspective of platform interests and does not take into account the acceptability of merchants.

Of course, we can also understand the operation of Meituan. After all, in Meituan's financial report last year, the take-away business revenue still accounted for more than 51% of the total business revenue. Therefore, in the short term, the situation of high commission may continue. Of course, the reason why Meituan dares to decide the level of its own, in addition to the advantages of big data, also has its absolute monopoly position in the take-away market.

Due to the investigation of "two choices", the stock price has dropped continuously

According to previous data, the market share of Meituan has exceeded 71%, especially the ecosystem established by Meituan is very attractive to merchants. The fact that the US Mission can have such high traffic is mainly due to the high investment in the early stage.

During the subsidy war in the take-away market, Meituan invested a lot of capital to subsidize users and businesses. For example, for a lunch in 31 yuan, Meituan may subsidize 5 yuan's meal for users, so that users can buy the lunch only by 25 yuan. At the same time, Meituan also subsidizes merchants and supports merchants to enhance the activity on the platform.

In fact, because the concessions of the giants have really attracted a large number of users to become members of the Meituan takeaway, and the high traffic brought by users has also attracted more businesses, just like snowballing, Meituan's market share is also growing. However, in the process of continuous subsidies, the losses of Meituan are also increasing. When Meituan Takeaway became an oligarch in the industry, it began to intensify and began to plunder market resources to fill the previous subsidy deficit.

At the same time, Meituan has to face the threat of competitors, so in order to further crack down on competitors and make them completely unable to resist, Meituan has secretly engaged in a "two-choice" strategy before, that is, letting merchants choose one of Meituan and Hungry. In this way, in order to expand online business, merchants have to give in to Meituan. Because if the merchants insist on uncompromising, then Meituan will limit the recommendation of "disobedient" merchants by lowering the search ranking and other means.

However, some time ago, some relevant departments began to investigate the "one of the two choices" of Meituan. For this antitrust investigation, some media even broke the news that the maximum fine could reach 12 billion. For the US delegation, this is not a good thing. Especially according to the observation during this period of time, as of May and 11, Meituan's share price has suffered a "nine-day losing streak", and its share price has fallen by 44% compared with the highest point this year, and its market value has evaporated by 1 trillion yuan.

written at the end

It can be said that this anti-monopoly investigation has dealt a heavy blow to Meituan, especially in our view, the take-away business is the core business of Meituan. If the main business encounters setbacks, it will inevitably have a certain impact on revenue and profits. In this way, the US Mission may fall into a bigger crisis. After all, from the current point of view, Meituan is still in the stage of continuing to "burn money" in its new business. If the take-away business can't hold up, then this year's loss is definitely certain, just don't know how much patience investors have left with Meituan.