18 Days Without Leaving Home, Living Only on Internet Services | Day 5: Ordering Flowers Is Hard

唐云路 · 2015-08-08 · English translation

This is not a contest over who can stay home the longest. It is an attempt to find out whether the new on-demand home services can give us a better quality of life.

After a hurried breakfast of yesterday's leftovers, the last working day of the week began with the morning meeting. It may disappoint you to hear that the day was once again full of twists and turns, so many that I had no time to be bored.

This is Day 5 of the stay-at-home experiment (click here for a detailed explanation). Under the banner of "18 days without leaving home," we want to put today's popular on-demand home services through a high-intensity test and see how much they can actually improve our lives.

Staying in for 18 days is not about seeing who is the biggest "homebody"; it simply sets a basic rule for the experiment. This afternoon my neighbor hit the same power outage my home had yesterday (catch up on what happened here), and I opened my door and helped her fix it while standing in the doorframe.

Over the remaining 13 days of the experiment, I will answer a few questions each day, including the ultimate one: "What exactly do I do with the garbage?" If you have questions, or want me to test a particular service too, leave a comment below this article or on QDaily's official Weibo or WeChat account.

[Flowers] Dianping – Huabaitang | Waited 85 minutes

Ordered: 12:05; delivered: 13:30; 30 minutes ahead of the promised time

Cost: 129 yuan

Flowers ordered through Dianping

I have always felt that a room only feels lived in when there are fresh flowers in it. I don't have time to go to the flower market, so on my way home from work I often pick up a bunch at the subway exit I pass, sometimes jasmine, sometimes daisies. But these flowers rarely last long, and the quality isn't great.

I also love giving flowers. It may be a little "old-fashioned," but when I welcome someone, visit someone or say goodbye, I like to bring a small bunch.

Before the morning meeting had even ended, my roommate walked in the door. She had spent more than a week on the road in other cities and only got back to Beijing by train this morning. She has been preparing to leave Beijing to study abroad, and tomorrow she goes to her parents' home to make the final preparations before departure.

She is as warm and kind as a sunflower. Since she was home today, I decided to order a bouquet to welcome her back, or perhaps to say goodbye.

The first thing I thought of was Bloom, which I had used before: a bouquet of 4-5 sunflowers with 3-5 daisies costs 99 yuan, and its size, price and look all suited me. But because of heavy order volume, anything ordered today would only arrive tomorrow.

As for the one-hour flower delivery offered through platforms such as JD Daojia, Meituan and Baidu, the pictures did little to make me want to buy. Most of the bouquets are roses, as if meant to rescue people rushing to a date who forgot to bring a gift.

So I turned to the all-knowing Moments. A friend recommended FlowerPlus, which she had tried herself: you subscribe monthly, and each week it delivers different flowers that you arrange yourself at home or in the office. Unfortunately, FlowerPlus and similar services such as Huadian Shijian and Shiji all require advance booking, so nothing could arrive today.

A colleague ran into the same problem today. She wanted to order flowers to cheer me up, the "guinea pig who can't go out," but she didn't like the bouquets pictured by the fast-delivery services, and she couldn't find any online service that would deliver loose flowers for her to arrange herself on the same day.

"When I was in the US, I could pick out the flowers I wanted at Whole Foods for about 10 dollars. But the places with decent flowers now, like Bloom, don't let you choose your own stems, and the bouquets are mostly poor value," she said.

In the end I compared prices and ordered a sunflower bouquet through Dianping's home-delivery service. It was delivered by a middle-aged woman who owns a flower shop near the Workers' Stadium. She took out her phone, opened WeChat to show me, and said: "They tell me online where to deliver, and I take it over."

Fortunately, my roommate loved the bouquet when she got back. Still, how to keep fresh flowers in the house all the time without spending too much remains an open question in the experiment. Taidi Laundry recently launched a monthly houseplant subscription for 88 yuan, but after I placed the order, the system showed the earliest delivery date available was August 10. For the next few days, I will have to enjoy my roommate's flowers.

[Laundry] Taidi – Shoe Cleaning | Waited 323 minutes

Ordered: 10:40; picked up: 16:03; waited 323 minutes

Cost: 1 yuan

Taidi Laundry carried off the shoes to be cleaned in a special plastic bag

While I was hesitating over which shop to order flowers from, and whether to subscribe to Taidi's houseplants, I noticed an ad on Taidi's home page offering new users "sneaker cleaning for 1 yuan." Even without going out, I have kept up my habit of exercising at home, so I placed an order on a whim.

About ten minutes later, a staff member called to arrange a pickup time. For reasons everyone knows, I was home all day, so I asked him to come in the afternoon. But even with flexible hours, the afternoon is normally when I work.

Just now I opened the app to check the order status and found it had been updated with photos and a detailed description of the shoes, clearly taken on a workbench from a set angle. Without the new-user special, cleaning and delivery for this pair would have cost 24 yuan in total.

When he came to pick them up, the courier told me the cleaning might take 3 to 5 days, and that he would contact me again once the shoes were back at the delivery station.

[Lunch] WeChat – Sweetheart Rock Salad | 60 minutes early

Ordered: 10:52 the day before; estimated delivery 12:30; actual delivery 10:48

Cost: 25 yuan, minus a 10-yuan new-user discount and 1 yuan off for WeChat Pay; 14 yuan paid

The Sweetheart Rock Salad I booked a day in advance

Yesterday, figuring that Friday is usually a heavy workday, I ordered today's lunch salad at the same time as I booked yesterday's.

For a lunch eaten while rushing to finish a draft, it is enough to fill up quickly and healthily. As for flavor, doesn't all "grass" taste the same?

Sweetheart Rock Salad's ordering system only lets you book the next working day's meal before 18:30 the day before. So the next time I eat grass this healthy will be Monday at the earliest.

[Meal kit] Xinwei | Still waiting

Ordered: August 5, 16:37; estimated delivery: August 6

Xinwei is a startup that sells semi-prepared ingredient kits and ready-to-eat meal packs. Since I signed up for its closed beta more than a year ago, my friends and I have ordered from it several times. When we host dinners at home and don't want to spend much time cooking, these kits save a lot of trouble.

Besides its WeChat official account and Weibo, it recently added an iPhone app as a way to buy. A few days ago, a colleague in Shanghai was about to come to Beijing on business, so I ordered a two-person dinner kit from Xinwei to host her tonight.

After I placed the order, the status showed delivery expected today.

But when I asked customer service this afternoon, I learned that their payment system had a problem: although I had already paid through Alipay, their finance system showed no payment received. The customer service rep on Weibo patiently coordinated with finance and inventory for me and estimated delivery in a day or two.

Once she heard that the Xinwei kit would not arrive today, the colleague who was coming to dinner made other plans and cancelled.

I have hit the same problem with many other apps. Because the products launched recently, many functions are still being debugged, and staffing and inventory management are often poorly connected. The service itself is generally fine; what disappoints tends to be technical details.

But not every user stays understanding all the time.

[Meeting] Zoom

Time: 17:00-18:00

As usual, we hold a meeting in the office every Friday. Once I had finished the day's work in the afternoon, another colleague and I started looking for an app, other than Skype or WeChat video, that would let me join the meeting remotely.

The screen shows a livestream, not a photo

First we tried a few livestreaming apps popular in China, such as Huajiao Live and KK Live. If you happened to be on one of them this afternoon, you may have seen the QDaily office during our colleague's streaming test.

Their problem is that you cannot restrict who watches. As I joined my colleague's channel, I watched strangers keep sending likes to the "screaming chicken" toy in our office, and I grew a little anxious.

In the end we found Zoom, which behaved relatively sanely. Once the host starts a meeting, participants only need to enter the meeting ID to join. In the half hour or so of the meeting I never dropped off, and I could even hear our Shanghai colleague clearly, though she had dialed in by phone.

I also got to see colleagues I had not seen in a long time. The process was bumpy, but the result was still fun.

[Grocery delivery] WeChat – Xiaocaixian | Waited 55 minutes

Ordered: 16:55; promised delivery within 30 minutes to 1 hour; delivered: 17:50

Cost: 47.5 yuan

The ingredients brought by the Xiaocaixian delivery man

With neither the meal kit nor my colleague coming, I decided to use a nearby fresh-food delivery service to make dinner with my roommate. Xiaocaixian has two delivery zones in Beijing, and my home happens to be in one of them. Because the order included meat, which spoils easily in summer, the package came with an ice pack.

The delivery man told me his only job is to pick up the already-packed groceries at the delivery point and bring them over. But we hit a problem at payment too: he had no change. I searched every corner of the house and still could not scrape together the right amount, so I taught him on the spot how to collect money through WeChat.

Fortunately, he had no objection to being paid by phone.

Today's At-Home Tips

After shopping online, you often get text messages about shipping progress. They can feel intrusive, but if your phone stays unusually quiet after a purchase, something may be wrong with the order.
Experimenting at home does not mean not working. Making sure no one interrupts you during a continuous stretch of work is one way to work more efficiently. In my experience, getting up in the morning and washing my hair and face and changing clothes, just as I would before going to the office, creates a fixed routine that helps you get into work mode quickly, instead of letting the comfort of home drag down your efficiency.
Total cost for Day 5: 192.5 yuan