# Parcel post area, no "express" By [Evelyn](https://paragraph.com/@evelyn-4) · 2022-05-03 --- Slow down “next day” Our reporter / Wang Yu Issued on the 1041 issue of China Newsweek on April 25, 2022 Cat food has bottomed out. After the problem of hungry people was solved by community group purchase, cat food has become the biggest anxiety of Shanghai citizen Zhou an at present. When placing an order in jd.com, the order shows the delivery on April 15, two days after the agreed delivery date. Now, the order shows that she has to wait another week. She tried to buy 10 kilograms of cat food together with the residents of the community. At ordinary times, it costs 399 yuan, but now it costs 578 yuan. The price is not so important. Just buy it. But the group purchase cost 2000 yuan, and she didn’t get it in the end. Zhou an thought, “it’s really not good. I’ll exchange vegetables with my neighbors.” For Shanghai, which is used to silky and convenient life experience, the feeling of “stuck” is too strange and unbearable. The network formed by countless supply chains is revealed in the daily life of urban residents for the first time. In the past, they have been perfectly obscured by small squares with e-commerce logos in smart phones. People have never cared about the composition of the chain before they found that the two ends of supply and demand linked by “next day” in the past are so far away. Break through levels At the other end of the e-commerce network, Tara, the founder of the pet food brand “Jiusheng”, is suffering. Tara started its business in 2020. With the growth of the epidemic, the company has long been used to the operation friction brought by logistics. Almost every day, there are orders that can’t be delivered. The customer is very confused: “Zhongtong in our city is still delivering. Why can’t you deliver it?” It is difficult for her to give a clear explanation. Sometimes it is because of the epidemic in the receiving place or logistics transfer station, and sometimes it is because of the high-speed road closure. Different express companies and transportation routes are also different, so it is difficult to generalize. For a long time, she was forced to obtain a set of cognition and response plan: compared with SF and JD, four links and one access are easier to be cut off, but delivery is the most important. She can ignore the cost and can’t send SF to JD or JD to SF. I can’t even get there. EMS is the last choice. It’s very slow, but it can be sent. However, this set of experience has failed since the end of March. With the spillover of the epidemic in Shanghai, the delivery problem can no longer be solved by simple express delivery. No matter what express delivery is selected, delivery in warehouses, highways, transfer stations and stations, “every single transportation is like breaking through customs at all levels”. On March 11, in Wukang street, Deqing County, Huzhou City, Zhejiang Province, the staff disinfection and sterilization the express packages in the express Investment Department of the postal company. Figure / Zhongxin Jiusheng’s factory is located in Shandong, the origin of Broilers and ducks. Its online sales account for more than 95%. Jd.com, tmall.com, Taobao, xiaohongshu and Tiktok all have stores with a monthly order volume of about 20000 orders. Guangdong is the largest source of orders, followed by Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Shanghai, which account for more than one third of the total. Therefore, she chose to put the main warehouse in Kunshan, Jiangsu Province, which is located between the origin and the market. In Lujia Town, her warehouse is next to Kunshan warehouse in Jingdong. In the warehouse, each SKU has 45 days of stock. Facing the unprecedented obstruction of logistics, young entrepreneurs made plans as rationally and rigorously as possible. Small companies with less than 10 people responded to problems while looking for spare warehouses, and even prepared a large truck to load and transport the inventory at any time. But the control came suddenly and quickly, completely exceeding her expectations. On the afternoon of April 1, the warehouse received a notice that in order to control the spread of the epidemic, Kunshan implemented “silent management” from April 2 to 6. An hour later, the warehouse was sealed and there was no time to load and transport the goods out. The closure was delayed from the 6th to the 8th, and from the 8th to the 12th. The latest notice is delayed to the 19th. During this period, Tara tried to apply for emergency pass every day and found many departments, which were either rejected or told that she had “no right to approve”. At the other end of the network, the patience of users has reached the limit. For young urban residents, pets are no less important than their families. Carefully fed cats and dogs cannot easily and suddenly change food, which may harm their health. After “Jiusheng” cut off the supply of some families, the users were emotional and Tara felt very guilty, but she could not resist force majeure and could only teach users how to make cat food and dog food from the raw materials at home. The company, which is fully funded by partners, finally achieved breakeven at the end of last year and continued to make profits in the first three months of this year. When facing the choice of growth or conservative development, Tara chose to be steady. The bottom line of her financial regulations for the company is that the money on the account can guarantee the employee’s salary for six months. For Tara, the proportion of trunk logistics costs is very small. What the company needs to consider is the fulfillment cost of distribution to the C-end. There is a large amount of pet food. Many express companies have a discount price of to B, but the sealing control is endless. Now FA Shunfeng wants the full price. Tara has been able to control the cost of performing documents at 7% to 8% in the past two years, but now the cost of performing documents has increased by two to three times. “I can’t calculate the recent account. I don’t read it anymore and can’t review it.” Even so, Tara and her companions still have to find ways to deliver goods. The company is spending every day, raw materials and freight are rising, and there is no income without delivery. For small and medium-sized enterprises, a month’s interruption of cash flow is a fatal blow. Judging from experience, they temporarily transferred the warehouse to Beijing and asked the factory to rush up the products and send them all. It will be difficult to find the truck driver in Beijing if there is an epidemic. Tara also knows, “but there is no optimal solution at this time”. Before the interview with China Newsweek, Tara received a phone call from her colleague: when unloading, the driver will sit on the ground and ask for a temporary increase in money, otherwise it will not be transported next time. “Off chain” For the large network of express industry all over the country, the Yangtze River Delta and the Pearl River Delta are the two main production areas, where 70% to 80% of orders are generated. “According to the industry, now most of China’s express delivery is basically stopped.” Chen Zhu told China Newsweek that he worked for an express company headquartered in Shanghai. “If one node in the whole network is broken, the other nodes can be on top and supported slightly, but now so many nodes have problems, it is difficult to connect again.” Ye Sheng, another practitioner, works for a less than carload express company headquartered in Shanghai, mainly carrying large goods from manufacturing and trading enterprises --- *Originally published on [Evelyn](https://paragraph.com/@evelyn-4/parcel-post-area-no-express)*