Picking up a parcel used to mean an hour-long round trip on mountain roads. Now the elderly can walk to the village shop and be back in five minutes.
Those missing fifty-five minutes have an explanation. Pinduoduo covers the transshipment cost of getting deliveries into villages. Parcels are hauled from county-level warehouses to village collection points, and recipients no longer have to pay for those last few kilometers.
By the Wu River, there’s a young woman named Yang Yinyin. She lives away from home and bought her parents enough things to fill a room. They hung a projection screen on the wall, alongside a sintered-stone dining table and a ceiling light with a fan. One night, the whole village crowded into the house to watch a movie. Her parents couldn’t hide how proud they were.
The things themselves aren’t expensive. A screen, a table, a light—you can buy them in seconds on your phone. The hard part is getting them there.
Many people think bringing e-commerce to the countryside just means selling goods to rural customers. In reality, you first have to pay for that stretch of the journey before the goods can get through. If that part isn’t taken care of, even the cheapest goods stop in town. They just stop in town.
Zhang Xi, a courier station manager in Jingxing, Hebei, set up ninety stations on his own. With two drivers, he covers the northern and southern districts. The farthest village is forty kilometers from the transfer warehouse. A small shop that’s been open for more than twenty years now doubles as a parcel station, handling a dozen or so packages a day.
That number sounds pretty paltry. But among those dozen or so parcels are hoes and sprayers for the elderly to use during spring planting, eggplant and cucumber seeds, as well as holiday goods and fresh food bought by their children living elsewhere.
Fresh food is where the problem really stands out. And where there used to be no solution. Picking up a parcel used to take half a day, and meat and vegetables would spoil on the way. Now they arrive the same day.
There’s a line in that article about the courier that I read very carefully: the station manager teaches older people to place their first order on a phone, and gets a referral bonus for bringing them onto the platform. Every step the elderly learn as they tap the screen is both a service and a source of growth for the platform. Teaching them and signing them up can be one and the same thing. But once you know that, the next time you see a campaign about helping older people bridge the digital divide, you’ll probably pause for a second and wonder who benefits once they’ve crossed it.
Think about it one step further. What’s been erased is the price of that stretch of road. The distance hasn’t changed at all; it’s just that no one has to deal with it. Whoever pays that cost decides what goods can get in—and what can’t. What happens if one day no one pays it?
The same wall stands in the way on-chain. A transfer has one more step: getting it on-chain. The toll is called gas. It’s usually a few cents, but when the network gets congested, the fee for a single transaction can hit tens of dollars—more than the amount being transferred. There’s money in the wallet. The address is correct. But the user gets stuck right there.
Small, frequent transactions have never really taken off. It’s not that nobody wants to use them. The route is too expensive. People can’t afford it.
Then someone figured out that if you bundle lots of people’s transfers together and send them through in one batch, the cost per transaction goes down. It’s exactly the same idea as the platform covering the transshipment fees for the whole village. The difference is that on-chain, no one will cover the cost for you out of pocket; you have to use code to spread it out. Some chains produce blocks more frequently and push fees close to zero. When you get down to it, their selling point is just two words: cheap.
Back to that room in the village. If you’ve ever bought something for your family, think about it: that TV, that massage chair—the thing that really changed their lives was that picking up a delivery went from taking half a day to five minutes. The machine was just a bonus. That detail isn’t in the order information. It’s hidden behind the shipping fee.
As for how many villages this network actually reaches, and how much money it has lost, the figures you can find all come from the platform itself. I searched for ages, but couldn’t find a reliable figure for the few yuan in second-leg transshipment fees per order. There’s no clear answer.
$BTC $SOL $USDC
#拼多多 #农村物流 #Binance Square
Those missing fifty-five minutes have an explanation. Pinduoduo covers the transshipment cost of getting deliveries into villages. Parcels are hauled from county-level warehouses to village collection points, and recipients no longer have to pay for those last few kilometers.
By the Wu River, there’s a young woman named Yang Yinyin. She lives away from home and bought her parents enough things to fill a room. They hung a projection screen on the wall, alongside a sintered-stone dining table and a ceiling light with a fan. One night, the whole village crowded into the house to watch a movie. Her parents couldn’t hide how proud they were.
The things themselves aren’t expensive. A screen, a table, a light—you can buy them in seconds on your phone. The hard part is getting them there.
Many people think bringing e-commerce to the countryside just means selling goods to rural customers. In reality, you first have to pay for that stretch of the journey before the goods can get through. If that part isn’t taken care of, even the cheapest goods stop in town. They just stop in town.
Zhang Xi, a courier station manager in Jingxing, Hebei, set up ninety stations on his own. With two drivers, he covers the northern and southern districts. The farthest village is forty kilometers from the transfer warehouse. A small shop that’s been open for more than twenty years now doubles as a parcel station, handling a dozen or so packages a day.
That number sounds pretty paltry. But among those dozen or so parcels are hoes and sprayers for the elderly to use during spring planting, eggplant and cucumber seeds, as well as holiday goods and fresh food bought by their children living elsewhere.
Fresh food is where the problem really stands out. And where there used to be no solution. Picking up a parcel used to take half a day, and meat and vegetables would spoil on the way. Now they arrive the same day.
There’s a line in that article about the courier that I read very carefully: the station manager teaches older people to place their first order on a phone, and gets a referral bonus for bringing them onto the platform. Every step the elderly learn as they tap the screen is both a service and a source of growth for the platform. Teaching them and signing them up can be one and the same thing. But once you know that, the next time you see a campaign about helping older people bridge the digital divide, you’ll probably pause for a second and wonder who benefits once they’ve crossed it.
Think about it one step further. What’s been erased is the price of that stretch of road. The distance hasn’t changed at all; it’s just that no one has to deal with it. Whoever pays that cost decides what goods can get in—and what can’t. What happens if one day no one pays it?
The same wall stands in the way on-chain. A transfer has one more step: getting it on-chain. The toll is called gas. It’s usually a few cents, but when the network gets congested, the fee for a single transaction can hit tens of dollars—more than the amount being transferred. There’s money in the wallet. The address is correct. But the user gets stuck right there.
Small, frequent transactions have never really taken off. It’s not that nobody wants to use them. The route is too expensive. People can’t afford it.
Then someone figured out that if you bundle lots of people’s transfers together and send them through in one batch, the cost per transaction goes down. It’s exactly the same idea as the platform covering the transshipment fees for the whole village. The difference is that on-chain, no one will cover the cost for you out of pocket; you have to use code to spread it out. Some chains produce blocks more frequently and push fees close to zero. When you get down to it, their selling point is just two words: cheap.
Back to that room in the village. If you’ve ever bought something for your family, think about it: that TV, that massage chair—the thing that really changed their lives was that picking up a delivery went from taking half a day to five minutes. The machine was just a bonus. That detail isn’t in the order information. It’s hidden behind the shipping fee.
As for how many villages this network actually reaches, and how much money it has lost, the figures you can find all come from the platform itself. I searched for ages, but couldn’t find a reliable figure for the few yuan in second-leg transshipment fees per order. There’s no clear answer.
$BTC $SOL $USDC
#拼多多 #农村物流 #Binance Square