The gradually disappearing Northeast Internet: Hometown is the way out of the cage

Legend has it that there is a unique genre of writing in Chinese Internet writing called "Going Home for the New Year".

This type of article is generally filled with words like "cruel" and "escape", which makes it seem very lofty. This article is also about what I saw and felt during the past few days back in my hometown in Northeast China, but it obviously does not have such a strong sense of patriotism, nor does it intend to express any emotion or pain about any regional issues. It is just a small observation.

First, let me explain the background: my hometown is a small city in the northeast, which was once a famous industrial base. As for the population, it’s hard to say. I feel that the population density of the streets during the New Year is completely different from that when I go home on other days.

What I found interesting is that the mobile Internet, which is so popular in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou and which we are so proud of, has not gradually affected such a small city in Northeast China. On the contrary, the Internet industry that once covered Northeast China overnight is rapidly fading on such a calm stage, and is even on the verge of a vacuum.

Things are like spring dreams, leaving no trace.

“I gave business cards to everyone who took Didi.”

It all started like this. On the first day back home, I had to go out to do something, so I opened Didi to call a car out of habit. But I found that no one responded to the order I sent out for a long time... This is not what the script said! Didn't I say that all the drivers in Beijing had gone home? I went home too, so why was there still no car?

After waiting for a long time, I gave up and waved to a taxi. After getting in the car, I complained to the driver about the Didi malfunction. As a result, the driver scolded me and quickly said, "No one uses Didi, you deserve to be cold, you are stupid in the big city." Then, the driver gave me a business card and told me to call this number next time I want a taxi. It works very well...

As I was thinking about this, the driver suddenly started to answer the phone. I could hear the conversation very clearly because he was using the speakerphone. The person on the other end of the phone said that a certain location needed a car and he needed it quickly.

The driver said, "OK, I'll be there right away. Please tell me your phone number twice." Then he started to record the number. The key point is that during the whole process, this guy listened to the number on one phone and then wrote it down on another phone... At the same time, he was driving at a very fast speed...

Fortunately, curiosity overcame my fear of death, and I decided to find out how he was going to play. After the driver hung up the call, he turned on a function similar to an intercom and asked, "Who is near a certain place? Someone has booked a car, the phone number is XXXX." After saying it twice, he finally stopped operating two phones and a steering wheel at the same time, and I arrived at my destination...

Before getting off the car, the driver proudly told me that he also had Didi in his car, but he would give each Didi passenger a business card and tell them to call if they needed a car. "This way, I won't have money to rob you, and all the money I take is mine," the driver told me happily...

Later, I learned that my family members really stopped using Didi. On the one hand, taxis in small cities are cheap, and the prices on Didi are unreasonable. On the other hand, this seemingly old-fashioned "calling a car" can get a car faster. The fixed fleet will also remember each passenger's mobile phone number and name them "XX Big Brother" and "XX Big Sister" based on the last digit of the mobile phone number. The advantage of this is that in many cases, as long as you call, the driver will know where to pick you up without saying anything.

In order to better understand the working method of "de-online car-hailing" in Northeast China, I subsequently conducted a small-scale sampling survey in my hometown by taking taxis intensively. The results showed that 100% of the taxis I took were in a fleet, with a minimum of a dozen vehicles and a maximum of hundreds of vehicles. They usually received jobs through the same phone, reported the location on the platform, and whoever was closest would do the job.

I have also inquired from many sources about how to establish this "small-scale local area network" taxi alliance. First, you need to buy a system similar to a paging station and install it on the mobile phones of everyone in the fleet. It is said that this system is available on Taobao. But when I asked about the purchase keywords, several drivers did not tell me the answer. But they all told me that the cost is about a few yuan per driver per month - equivalent to everyone pulling a group and using manual intercom to execute the car booking method.

The next steps are a bit complicated. After purchasing the system, someone needs to answer the phone and then "manually dispatch orders" in the group. At this time, there are two options:

1. A fleet with many vehicles will hire a person to answer phone calls and dispatch orders. Drivers generally call her "Zongtai Laomei". According to the author's observation, once a driver says "Zongtai Zongtai", he is going to take an order or report a situation; once a driver says "Laomei", he is going to tell a dirty joke. So this is probably a job that requires a certain level of psychological endurance.

2. A fleet with insufficient vehicles generally cannot evenly share the salary of a full-time employee. This will lead to the situation described above, where drivers take turns answering the phone and dispatching orders. When you get in a taxi and find that the driver is busy with several mobile phones while driving, it means that you have encountered a "rotating chairman"... Safety issues? The author actually discussed this possibility with a driver, and the response he got was "Why don't you just not get in?"

After confirming that this type of LAN taxi is already very common, I tested Didi in multiple locations. The platform still works, but the number of vehicles displayed is very small. In particular, private cars, which are "express cars", are said to face various huge obstacles and have completely withdrawn from the online car-hailing market.

My friends back home think this is normal: Why should I spend so much time fiddling with my phone when I can just make a phone call and get the job done?

Delivery guy? No, we are an errand company.

Legend has it that mobile Internet has created the three biggest job opportunities: online ride-hailing drivers, couriers, and food delivery boys.

After seeing the changes in the online ride-hailing platform, I decided to explore the other two professions. Unfortunately, it was the Spring Festival, and the express delivery industry had stopped working except for SF Express, so I had to focus on food delivery, the king of O2O.

First, I asked my family about their use of food delivery platforms. The answer I got was that they no longer used Meituan, Ele.me or other platforms to order food. Instead, they directly called a place called a "running errand company" and told it what they wanted from a certain restaurant, and then waited for the delivery to meet them and pay.

This kind of "errand company" will determine the delivery fee based on the distance of the delivery. In my area, the average fee is about 5 yuan per store, and there will be a discount if you go to more stores.

When I first heard about this model, my first reaction was that how could I decide what to eat without seeing the menu and prices? As a result, I asked several relatives, and they generally told me that I just ate at the same restaurants I often ate at, and I didn’t need to look at the menu at all. In general, a sentence like “I want the sweet and sour pork from XYZ, the braised pork ribs from XYZ, or the barbecue from XYZ” can solve the problem.

In order to test whether this kind of "errand company" that relies on telephone communication has really posed a threat to the food delivery platform, the author conducted a small-scale sampling test. The method is to go to several different areas, open the food delivery app, and observe the number of merchants settled in.

If my memory serves me right, the number of merchants on food delivery platforms has indeed dropped significantly compared to the previous two years. More importantly, the delivery radius of many stores has been greatly reduced, and they can often only deliver to the most prosperous areas.

I interviewed... or more precisely, I talked to restaurant owners after eating, and they generally confirmed my observation: the money collected by the "errand companies" is similar to the platform's delivery fee, but the commission is very small, and the delivery staff can get a higher return. Therefore, a large number of delivery boys have turned to "errand companies", which has led to a large reduction in platform delivery staff. They can only move in high-frequency delivery areas, and it is difficult to make a profit if they are a little further away.

However, "errand running companies" operate throughout the entire city, so of course there will be differences in market share.

After interviewing many parties, I found another situation: some merchants will accept orders on food delivery platforms, but choose the "merchant delivery" method. In fact, the merchants are unable to deliver, so they still hire errand companies to do it. The effect of this is that the merchants can earn a little more per order, because the errand company will return a certain amount of delivery fees to the merchants every month.

But the disadvantages are also obvious. The errand companies do not have the insulated boxes and other equipment of professional takeaway drivers, so it is difficult to guarantee the delivery environment. In the temperature of Northeast China, if you don’t use an insulated box and just deliver the food in a plastic bag, then any food you order will be chilled - don’t ask me how I know.

In short, as far as we can see, the errand companies that have developed independently in these places are almost killing the food delivery platforms...

There are only WeChat and Kuaishou on my phone

When we lament that our daily lives are becoming more and more tied to mobile phones, we suddenly look back and find that mobile phones are becoming less and less needed in our hometown. This is actually a very magical experience.

In order to further understand the composition of mobile phone APP usage in daily life in Northeast China, the author conducted another small-scale sampling survey. This time I found four classmates living in my hometown in Northeast China (it was not easy to find four, thank you), hoping to understand which APPs they use the most.

Among the four survey subjects, two were civil servants, one was a worker, and one was preparing to take the civil service exam. In the end, I found that only Kuaishou and WeChat were apps installed on the phones of these four people, and one of them did not even have Alipay.

While lamenting the strong penetration of Kuaishou, I can't help but worry about the daily enthusiasm and confidence of the mobile Internet. O2O and sharing economy, industries that rely on a large number of labor resources, are actually easily replaced by local economies in a small market. And mobile Internet, as a lifestyle, is actually far less solid than we usually imagine.

For example, in Northeast China, it is easy to find that various mobile Internet products are in decline.

For e-commerce, you can basically use the magical method of "ask my sister to get the goods" to replace it.

As for videos, the phone is too small to see them clearly and it consumes data. At most, you can only watch live broadcasts or short videos.

Shared bikes don't exist.

Map navigation is unnecessary.

Zhihu, Jianshu, what are they?

The most interesting thing is mobile games. I once again conducted a small-scale sample survey (how free I am). It turns out that no one knows what Traveling Frog is, and the most popular game is not King of Glory, but the mobile version of CrossFire. This is probably worth a separate story.

In short, for young people in their 20s and 30s living in their hometowns, mobile phones don’t seem to be that important. WeChat speeding up may represent a cultural symbol and a kind of seemingly absurdity.

Mobile Internet may not be a one-way street

Until the end of the article, I still have no intention of criticizing this "de-internet" culture. In my opinion, this is also a natural survival of the fittest: you know, whether it is the group buying war, the Didi-KuaiDi battle, or the O2O wave, they have all swept this black land.

But after the wave, the platform entered the harvest period, and the benefits that were visible at the beginning often evaporated overnight. In addition, the operating quality of national platforms in fourth-, fifth- and sixth-tier cities is very low. Isn’t it extremely normal for such a fragile business model to be hit hard by "folk wisdom"?

What we should really care about is probably the so-called Internet thinking that we usually over-trust, believing that "once the Internet, always the Internet", and that as long as the direction is right, we can go as far as we want, so we believe in the wind and approve of the race to grab land. But the reality is that a regional market can completely retreat step by step to a state without the mobile Internet industry, and can completely do without those seemingly high-end "mobile era lifestyles".

China is so big that maybe when you return to your hometown, you will reach outside the cage.

Thinking about it this way, the Chinese New Year is still quite interesting.

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.