288 Hours Without Leaving Home: What Is It Like to Live on Internet Services Alone?

唐云路 · 2015-08-15 · English translation

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

In the second 144 hours of the experiment, time seemed to pass faster. I still have 144 hours left to spend in this rented two-bedroom apartment.

The experiment asks one question: now that internet startups are booming, how far can mobile apps improve our quality of life?

Over the past 144 hours, I sent my roommate away and lived "alone" in the strictest sense. I talked to my editors and worked with colleagues as usual through online tools. On a few days I invited interviewees over to talk about what they are working on.

Everything else in daily life went through mobile apps: food delivery, parcels, cleaning, purchasing agents, errand runners and repairs. Through apps I booked a barber to trim my hair, a masseur to rescue my aching back, and a yoga instructor to teach me at home. One day, through an online assistant service, I even invited a white schnauzer over as a guest.

A haircut at home A haircut at home

The yoga instructor arrives The yoga instructor comes to the door

A dog comes over to be petted

Apart from some fatigue after two straight days of fast-food delivery, the "18 days without going out" experiment, now two-thirds done, has not bored me. I have put up with the poor user experience of half-finished products, and I have also enjoyed the convenience at-home services bring.

Besides live-posting on QDaily Research Lab (HackYourLife)'s Weibo account, I also listed myself on an experience-sharing social platform and invited anyone interested in the topic to talk it over with me. Here is what my life looked like over the past six days:

Can an online assistant really do everything?

Online assistants were the biggest discovery of these six days for improving quality of life. If I hadn't been trying to sample as many kinds of service as possible each day, I would gladly have handed every need to an online assistant.

Counting Youyou Xiaomi, which I never managed to use, I have tried five assistant services that are online 24 hours a day, including Linqu, Zhuli Laiye, Get Yixia and Shenzhu.

They all work in much the same way: real human assistants respond around the clock. For standard needs such as ordering food, booking a table, hailing a car or calling a courier, the assistant simply books on your behalf. For non-standard needs, each service has its own approach.

At Linqu, for example, users post a task under "Buy Anything" and set the tip themselves according to how hard the task is. A courier nearby takes the order and buys what the user wants, or carries out some special request. A Shenzhu assistant told me that users often ask them to arrange dinner, so their engineers built a system that orders a meal at random.

Zhuli Laiye relies on more than 30 "Xiao Lai" assistants working in the back end. One of them told me niche requests are especially common: "The weirdest one I've had was to solve a math olympiad problem. Luckily, I could do it!" Get Yixia, which has only just started, also hopes to break into the market through non-standard needs.

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 solving math problems look like an attempt to take over your boyfriend's job as well.

Compared with platforms such as Dianping and Meituan that plug in third-party services, online assistants save you the time of choosing and ordering, and they feel more human. After all, there is a living person on the other side of the screen. For now these services are completely free. Zhuli Laiye plans a monthly VIP service that gives each user one or two dedicated assistants. Get Yixia told QDaily it will make money through other channels and will not charge users.

But no one can exercise, read or breathe fresh air for you

Given Beijing's air quality, finding fresh air is a matter of luck whether you go out or not. Install an air purification system at home, and you might even get more fresh air by staying in.

My colleagues had warned me: "Don't let us see you after 18 days only to find you too weak to walk." With that in mind, I tried a different way each day to keep up some exercise without going out.

On a few days I picked two workout routines on Keep that need no special space and did some simple exercises along with the demonstration videos. I also tried booking a fitness coach for remote video lessons. Yesterday I had a yoga instructor come over for an hour of "Hatha slimming yoga."

Although I made a point of not sitting at the computer all the time and set aside time for exercise, my activity level over these days at home has stayed pitifully low. My weight hasn't changed noticeably just because I started exercising.

Helen, a fitness coach, advised that even if you never leave the house, a half-hour Jung Da-yeon weight-loss workout is not enough. At the very least, you should finish a full set of Pump It Up, so that you exercise for more than an hour.

My exercise data for this week

If you have the space, of course, a coach who comes to your home is ideal. The coach from Super Slimming King corrected my movements over video again and again with great patience, but only after the yoga instructor came to my home did I realize that video cannot replace a coach who adjusts your breathing and the intensity of each movement in person.

A fitness coach gives remote guidance

The best things can't be bought: safety and trust

Since the experiment began, family, friends and even complete strangers have kept reminding me of one thing: with so many strangers coming to your door, be careful.

When a colleague of mine booked a personal trainer for a home lesson, she only dared to meet in the public area downstairs from her apartment building. The manicurist from Duoduo Meijia also advised me that if I book a manicurist of the opposite sex, I could have a friend there too, or meet somewhere like an office or a café.

The people who come to provide services, most of them women, have voiced similar worries. Linda, a yoga instructor at Randian, told me they serve only female customers. Their "office yoga" classes, which might have had male students, were suspended for safety reasons and replaced by "office fitness" classes taught by fitness coaches.

Ms. Li, a masseuse at Gongfuxiong (Kung Fu Bear), worries less. "People who book generally have a (health) need, so I usually don't think too much about it," she said. Still, one of her company's rules is that masseuses must wear the standard uniform; shorts, skirts and the like are not allowed on the job.

Get Yixia hopes to connect everyone who needs a service with everyone who can provide one. When I asked how it keeps people safe, Huang Youliang, its head of marketing, said: "A year ago, people wouldn't take a private-hire car for safety reasons. But those cars actually have GPS tracking, and now most people accept them."

Everyone worries about safety, and I too tried to pick female service providers. But on reflection, perhaps it isn't that serious. Both providers and customers must register with a mobile phone number, the platform keeps detailed records of every order, and most are linked to payment methods tied to real-name verification. In most cases, that is safer than walking into a random shop on the street.

Over these days, several couriers added me on WeChat simply because they wanted to get to know me. I also added the yoga instructor, the fitness coach and the repairman, so I can reach them quickly next time. And because I opened the door so often for parcels and takeout, I said hello to upstairs and downstairs neighbors I had never met.

There was nothing bad about any of this.

These internet services are growing faster than the products themselves

If anything is bad, it is the new products themselves.

Two-thirds of the way through the experiment, I have installed 62 apps for at-home services and followed 45 new WeChat official accounts. I haven't used every one of them, but every day I spend a great deal of time and patience on these half-finished products.

Among the services I have used, Shansong and Shangmenbang alone recently announced funding that adds up to nearly 100 million yuan. Capital is flowing into new at-home services, and entrepreneurs are pouring into the field. Just look at how busy the street promotion stalls are around the office-tower districts of Beijing and Shanghai.

These products connect people who need services with people who provide them. Perhaps because the model is simple and the product logic easy to copy, many apps were rushed to market before they were ready.

I have lost count of how many times an app crashed for no reason and made my phone restart itself. I can't work out how many times, on average, I had to re-enter verification codes, phone numbers and passwords before a single service would let me register. As for crude interfaces that don't fit different phone models, I can't be bothered to think about them.

Take Shenghuoquan. Registering took me from morning to afternoon. I switched from phone to PC and from PC back to phone, and still had to call customer service twice before the back-end staff registered me themselves. In all, it took more than 40 minutes.

And yet I braced myself again and again to keep using them. Leaving aside the fact that I am running a lifestyle experiment, why put up with them? Because they meet a need. Users spend time searching, ordering and waiting, and pay more than it would cost to walk downstairs and buy groceries. In return they get the convenience of being served without leaving home.

Though often, the time and patience you spend are far more than you expected.

Here is my log for Day 12:

[Lunch] Jinshisong-Wagas | Waited 73 minutes

Ordered: 11:27; delivered: 12:40

Cost: food 110 yuan, delivery fee 15 yuan, total 125 yuan

Food delivered by Jinshisong, packed by the restaurant itself

To test ordering food through all sorts of unconventional channels, I had eaten four takeout meals in a row. A colleague happened to visit at noon, so I decided to order something less "fast food" and opened Jinshisong.

Jinshisong bills itself as a delivery service for "mid-to-high-end dining," and its menu includes restaurants that usually don't deliver. Popular choices include Yinquan, Stuff'd, Putaoyuan'er, Din Tai Fung and Xinyuansu.

Soon a staff member called to confirm my address and invoice details. The food arrived a little later than the promised 60 minutes, but my colleague and I still enjoyed a good lunch. Being people who work with words, though, we spent a long time debating whether the slogan printed on Jinshisong's cutlery packaging, "eat happily," contained a typo (the Chinese uses the wrong form of the particle "de").

[Massage] Gongfuxiong | 4 minutes early

Ordered: 10:44; appointment: 14:00; service time: 45 minutes

Cost: 128 yuan; 98 yuan paid with a coupon

The masseuse with her custom backpack

Perhaps because yesterday's yoga stretched muscles I hadn't used in a long time, I woke up with an aching lower back and could hardly sit up straight. After comparing several in-home massage services, I chose Gongfuxiong, the only one offering a "back and waist" treatment.

For various reasons, I booked Ms. Li, a female masseuse 4 kilometers away. After cleaning her hands, Ms. Li set a timer and began. As she worked, she told me what to watch for in how I sit and stand day to day. In short, after being pressed until I couldn't help yelping, my back pain finally eased.

Ms. Li has more than ten years of experience and joined Gongfuxiong less than two months ago. Her grip was every bit as strong as the male masseurs I had booked before. But because my bed is rather low, she had to brace one hand on the mattress and massage with the other.

She told me she left a better-paying shop to do home massage so she would have more free time to look after her child, who is in primary school.

[Fresh groceries] Meituan Waimai-Qingnian Caijun | Waited 1 day

Ordered: August 13, 09:38; delivered: 15:47; ordered one day, delivered the next

Cost: 37.5 yuan; 15 yuan off orders over 30 yuan; 22.5 yuan paid

Prepped vegetables from Qingnian Caijun, delivered through a food delivery platform

Qingnian Caijun is a startup that sells washed, cut, ready-to-cook vegetables. You can order through its WeChat official account, its website and various food delivery platforms. Orders must be in by midnight, and the next day you either pick them up in your community or at the subway entrance near your residential compound, or have them delivered to your home.

Because the WeChat ordering system was clunky, I ordered through a food delivery platform instead. By early this morning the order showed as completed, yet I had received no message at all. It left me thinking tonight's dinner might not come from it after all.

In the end, the three dishes I ordered arrived wrapped in cling film and plastic bags, brought to my door by a Baidu Waimai courier. He was in a hurry to make his next delivery and couldn't explain clearly how Qingnian Caijun works with the various delivery platforms. The ingredients were washed and cut, ready to go straight into the pan, and looked reasonably fresh.

[Supermarket] Shenghuoquan-BHG Premium Supermarket | Waited 68 minutes

Ordered: 15:18; delivered: 16:26; 22 minutes ahead of the promised 90-minute delivery

Cost: 33.01 yuan

A Shenghuoquan butler shops at the supermarket and delivers to the door

Since I wasn't sure Qingnian Caijun would arrive, I made a backup plan. Shenghuoquan is a supermarket shopping service a colleague recommended. Its shoppers are called "butlers." Unlike the crowdsourced delivery of Jimaisong, which I had used earlier, Shenghuoquan employs its butlers full time.

I chose the nearby BHG Premium Supermarket and ordered what I needed for dinner. But the prices on the page looked off; they didn't match what I remembered of that supermarket. When the butler called me from the store, I learned why: in their rush to add the new supermarket to the system, the technical staff had simply copied over Carrefour's prices.

In the end, I asked the butler to skip anything whose price was far from what the app listed. Scallions that cost 0.6 yuan downstairs, for example, were not worth buying there at ten times the price.

As with other supermarket shopping services, the final charge follows the supermarket receipt. But because I had paid online, the overpayment went back to my Shenghuoquan account balance rather than to the account I paid from.

That was my twelfth day without going out. Total cost: 278.51 yuan.

This week's tips for living at home:

Meal-replacement powder drinks seem to have become fashionable, but we don't encourage fasting for long periods;
If you decide to try a different kind of meal replacement, mute the food lovers in your Moments beforehand, and better not watch any food movies;
Quality of life is directly tied to whether you eat takeout;
Life is of course more than buying and eating. Internet services cannot fully meet needs beyond the material. After all, no one can think for you;
If your schedule is tight, don't tell couriers, "I'm home all day."
If you rarely cook, start with fairly simple dishes, even when using semi-prepared ingredient kits.
In-home services are now fairly safe because they register their workers' details. But when it comes to safety, no amount of care is ever enough;
To work out at home, clear an area where you can move freely, and before vigorous exercise, check how well your home is soundproofed;
Many new services offer discounts to new users, so a first try is sometimes close to free. That is one reason my daily costs have dropped recently. Whether users will pay more for later orders varies from service to service;
For a yoga lesson at home, clear an open space big enough for two yoga mats. The coach recommends not eating for two hours before exercising;
You can now order food from inside all kinds of apps, but for convenience it is still better to order directly from food delivery platforms with reliable delivery;
Total cost: 1,067 yuan