18 Days Without Leaving Home, Living Only on Internet Services | Day 10: Even a Dog Will Come to Your Door

唐云路 · 2015-08-13 · English translation

This is not a contest to see who can stay home the longest. QDaily Research Lab wants to find out whether the new wave of at-home services can give us a better quality of life.

At noon, I posted on Moments asking for someone to come and fix a window screen and a clothes-drying rack. Apart from a few classmates who volunteered to help, the most common reply was: a boyfriend.

If food delivery, cleaning and in-home cooking are internet companies earnestly trying to look after you the way your mother would, then errands, medicine delivery, repairs and help with math problems look like an attempt to take over the boyfriend's job as well.

This is day ten of the stay-at-home experiment (details here). By going "18 days without leaving home," we want to put today's popular at-home services through an intensive test and see how much they can really improve our lives.

To be clear, I don't think women can't change a light bulb, fix a pipe or assemble furniture. The point of today's test is this: if one day you feel like playing the pampered princess, how far will an online assistant service go for you?

Today's theme is these assistants. They won't just tell you to drink more hot water; they will do almost anything for you. Nearly all of them are young men, with the occasional woman.

Here is a record of the whole day:

[Breakfast] Aixianfeng | Wait: 1 hour

Ordered: 8:27; delivered: 9:27; 33 minutes earlier than estimated

Cost: 30.8 yuan; 15-yuan new-user coupon; 15.8 yuan actually paid

Milk and snacks delivered by Aixianfeng

In the morning, I ordered milk and yogurt from Aixianfeng (a convenience-goods delivery app). To reach the 30-yuan minimum for delivery, I also threw some mini cucumbers and prunes into the cart.

The order page said delivery had not started and that the earliest arrival would be ten o'clock. But the courier later told me he usually starts work at eight or nine and sets off early whenever there is an order.

The services I have used most over the past few days are the one-hour delivery services. Whether it is self-operated express delivery like Aixianfeng and Benlai Convenience, or the supermarket shopping services plugged into JD Daojia (JD.com's on-demand delivery service), Meituan food delivery and Baidu food delivery, the most common items are snacks of every kind.

So when a craving hits, instead of sweet-talking your boyfriend, you might as well order chips and fruit yourself, whatever you fancy. The delivery guy will have it there within an hour anyway.

[Cleaning] Jiadian Guanjia (Home Appliance Butler) fridge cleaning | Wait: 0 minutes

Ordered: August 11; appointment: 9:00; arrived: 9:00

Cost: original price 100 yuan; 1 yuan actually paid with a coupon

The Jiadian Guanjia technician carries two toolboxes

Yesterday afternoon, I dug out a coupon I couldn't remember getting. It was crumpled, and I had no idea whether it was still valid (or whether the company still offered the service). Figuring it was worth a try, I booked a fridge cleaning for 4 p.m. that day.

A few minutes later, the technician called to say he had too many orders and couldn't make it, so we rescheduled. At nine the next morning, a young man carrying two toolboxes arrived right on time. One held ordinary tools such as a hose and a bucket; the other held a dedicated cleaning machine.

He probably hadn't expected my fridge to have gone so long without a cleaning. The frost was thick, and at first he said the job would take about half an hour. I helped him take everything out of the fridge and set it aside, then went back to the sofa to work, leaving him to defrost, disinfect and deodorize on his own.

By the time he had quietly finished the whole job and slotted the shelves back in one by one, 100 minutes had passed. Had I done it myself, I would probably have given up halfway through the defrosting.

He told me it is hard to predict how long a fridge cleaning will take. Sketching the size of his toolbox with his hands, he said: "Last time, for example, an older lady called me and asked why her three-door fridge seemed to be getting smaller and smaller. I went over and found a block of ice this big jammed inside."

[Food delivery] Qunar–Ele.me | Wait: 51 minutes

Ordered: 13:09; estimated delivery: 13:48; actual delivery: 14:00

Cost: 28 yuan; extra delivery fee 9 yuan; total 37 yuan

Ele.me food delivery, delivered by Dada

This May, the online travel platform Qunar added "food delivery" to its "local fun" section. Ordering takeout while booking a flight sounds like a slightly odd idea, but I decided to try it.

The "food delivery" service is provided by the food delivery platform Ele.me. Inside the channel, users can search by location for nearby restaurants that deliver, with restaurant information supplied by Ele.me. But nowhere in the ordering process is Ele.me's role made prominent.

I had once used Qunar to order afternoon tea to my office. After changing the address, I picked a restaurant with a fairly short wait and ordered a set meal. Only when the courier phoned me from outside the office door did I learn that the address change had gone wrong again...

After some back and forth, the courier agreed to go the extra distance and bring the food to my home, on condition that I pay the delivery fee for the extra leg. It was not a pleasant call: I had somehow ended up with the wrong address, and now had to wait longer and pay a second delivery fee, while the courier sounded aggrieved too, since the restaurant had clearly given him the office address.

Less than ten minutes later, I was eating the food he brought. I was starving anyway and barely noticed whether it tasted good.

[Repairs] Wanneng Xiaoge (All-Purpose Handyman) – Master Song

Ordered: 13:49; arrived: 18:43; left: 18:53

Cost: 60 yuan

Back to the question I started with: in the end I used "Wanneng Xiaoge," a WeChat official account a friend recommended. Tapping the "Book a repair" menu brings up several broad categories: lighting and wiring, faucets and pipe fittings, bathroom fixtures, doors, windows and furniture, drilling and drain unclogging, and walls and floors. Each category lists a dozen or so specific repair jobs, priced from 30 to 100 yuan.

After checking with customer service on WeChat, I uploaded photos of my broken drying rack and booked a repairman. Soon Master Song called, asked about the details and said he would come by sometime after six.

Master Song's day job is maintenance work at a state-owned enterprise; taking orders on the platform is a side job he started only recently. When he arrived, he fixed the rack in a few quick moves. Honestly, it would have taken me an hour of fumbling. As he was leaving, I asked him to look at the window screen I had taken down to wash and never put back.

Three seconds. Done.

But when it came to paying, Master Song hesitated, because strictly speaking neither job was on Wanneng Xiaoge's price list. In the end he charged me 60 yuan. I added him on WeChat myself, so I can call him whenever something else needs fixing.

Normally, when something at home needs repairing, you either do it yourself, call the property management office or ask a friend for help. Of course, if you live in an older residential compound, you could also stand by the road and wait for one of the itinerant "knife sharpening, range hood cleaning" men to come by. That might work too.

A service like Wanneng Xiaoge gives you a fix that doesn't require asking anyone for a favor. Put another way, it gives you a way to find a handyman in a city where you don't know anyone.

[Dinner] Zhuli Laiye (Assistant Is Here)–Ele.me | Wait: 27 minutes

Ordered: 17:48; arrived: 18:15

Cost: 33 yuan

Zhuli Laiye connected to Ele.me and placed the food order

One version of life's three ultimate questions goes: What's for breakfast? What's for lunch? What's for dinner?

At dinnertime, I really couldn't be bothered to decide what to eat. Two days earlier, when I used Zhuli Laiye to book a courier pickup, the assistant who helped me, "Xiaolai," had said they could do a lot of things, so this time I simply asked Xiaolai to order dinner for me. After asking about my location, budget and dietary restrictions, Xiaolai ordered me a set meal of spicy diced chicken with a can of Wong Lo Kat herbal tea.

I still had to forward the Ele.me verification code from my phone to the online assistant, but having someone else sort out dinner is a big help to anyone who agonizes over choices.

While waiting for the food, I chatted with Xiaolai. He told me Zhuli Laiye currently has fewer than 20 online assistants, each handling about 30 to 40 orders a day. When I asked, "Have you had any unusual requests?", Xiaolai shot back: "Soooo many!!!"

For a guy, a request to buy women's products is not hard, and a request to pass a message to someone's lover takes one phone call. The strangest request Xiaolai had ever received was to help solve a math olympiad problem.

I have no math problems left for the assistants. But my longing for the company of a cat or dog was also eased today.

[Assistant] Get – pet visit | Wait: 0 minutes

Ordered: 16:10; appointment: 20:30; arrived: 20:30

Cost: 9.9 yuan

Get sent a two-year-old schnauzer

My colleagues send me photos of Teacher Bai (the cat in our Shanghai office) every day to ease any loneliness from staying indoors, but sometimes I still want to pet a real cat or dog.

Get was another recommendation from Moments. Huang Youliang, its head of marketing, told me: "We want to be Uber for everything. If you have any nonstandard request, give it a try."

Like the Little Prince asking the pilot, "Please, draw me a sheep," I tentatively messaged customer service: "Could you send a cat or a dog to my home?"

Customer service said I could choose between a poodle and a schnauzer. In the end, because of the pets' schedules, we agreed that at 8:30 tonight I would wait at home for a white schnauzer. That is the dog you see here. Its name is "Dabao."

At the appointed time, Dabao's owner knocked on my door carrying an enormous cage. The moment they were inside, Dabao began dashing around the room nonstop. The owner told me he lives in Sihui, not far from me. That afternoon he had got a call from a friend of a friend asking whether he could bring his dog over for a visit, so after work he came with Dabao.

Dabao was a little shy with strangers, so I barely got to pet it. But watching it race around the room full of energy gave the day a warm ending. As for payment, Dabao's owner hadn't worked that out either. He joked: "Just pay the platform 0.1 yuan. That payment QR code isn't mine anyway."

If I weren't writing these reports day after day, I wouldn't believe I really haven't set foot outside my front door for ten days. And if the Apple Watch figures are right, I didn't get too little exercise today, either.

My activity data for today

Today's at-home tips:

Many newly launched services offer discounts to new users, so a first try is sometimes almost free. That is one reason my spending has dropped over the past few days. Whether users will pay more for the service afterward varies from one provider to the next.
On yesterday's question of "whether to add the courier on WeChat," the most common comment was: it depends on how good-looking he is. That said, looks are not the only thing that matters. Safety and trust are no joking matter.
Total cost: 156.7 yuan