We've all had that moment at work, have we not?
Dealing with a difficult client or a draining colleague and you wished oh, just give me a block button right now and I will press it right away.
Well, that digital fantasy is now a reality for thousands of delivery riders here in China.
This is such a big story.
A major platform is rolling out a powerful new feature the ability for riders to block unreasonably difficult customers.
It's a pretty big change in service industry power dynamics, and it's got everyone talking.
We're live from Beijing.
This is Roundtable.
I'm Steve.
And for today's show, I'm with Yushun and Yushan.
First up.
Let's be honest you've been there, I've been there.
We've all had those moments, perhaps at work, where you desperately wished for a block button.
It might be a client whose emails make you dread your inbox, or a colleague whose negative attitude towards seemingly everything it just clouds your entire morning.
Or maybe you have a recurring task that makes you feel like...
The motivation is gone.
Well, that fantasy is simple to digitally sidestep the interactions that drain your energy and compromise your peace of mind.
Well, as I mentioned just a moment ago, that very fantasy is now becoming an operational reality for thousands of delivery riders here in China.
News is buzzing about a major food delivery platform that has officially rolled out a groundbreaking new feature.
Now in this feature, the tool empowers riders to essentially block customers who have been flagged as perhaps unreasonably difficult, whether for constant complaints or unfair demands, or maybe just a pattern of disrespectful behavior.
And it's not just a minor update either.
It's a provocative experiment in rebalancing the power dynamics of the gig economy.
This gives workers a new form of agency, and it sparked a major conversation about dignity in digital labor.
We're going to talk about all of it this afternoon.
Yushun and Yushan, greetings to you.
Let's start from the very beginning.
Always a great spot to start.
What does it mean that delivery riders can now block their users?
Yeah, this topic has been like heatedly discussed lately.
So, according to the information of this app Meituan, one of the biggest food delivery platform here in China, and this platform is piloting this feature in seven cities, including Jingjiang city in Fujian province and Shaoxing city in Zhejiang province.
So this feature enables writers to rate and block customers within 48 hours of completing this order.
If writers encounter like, let's say, verbal abuse or threats, they can select do not deliver to this customer again or block specific users.
Through this app settings and once this customer is blocked and the relevant evidence is verified, so this platform also verify the whole situation, maybe their conversation and everything.
The rider will not receive orders from the customer for 365 days, which is one year.
So currently riders are allowed to maintain blocking status for a maximum of two customers simultaneously.
Two but only two.
No more than two.
Oh, I want to come back to that point a little bit later.
All right.
So this is how it works.
So a food delivery rider has some sort of negative interaction with a customer.
And that negative interaction could be any number of different things.
Then on the app, the rider's app, They have a button that they can press that says don't deliver to this person again.
And they can do that within 48 hours.
After that, the platform doesn't just take their word for it.
They investigate.
They find out what happened between the rider and the customer.
And then if it's verified to be accurate, then for a year that rider will not receive an order from that customer again.
I really like the fact that these delivery riders, they're now having this option to choose whether I can block this person, this customer, so-called customer or not.
Because previously I remember watching this from various social media platform of people in the service industry.
Whether you're a nurse or a delivery guy or an online car hauling driver, you don't seem to really have the option of choosing who to serve and also deny if you want to say no to this specific person.
It's like orders are assigned, patients are assigned to you.
But now, if you've encountered some say, complexity situation previously, then you have this option.
Even though only two, you still you have this option of saying no.
And that's something new and a big leap of faith in the service industry.
Yeah, I find it interesting, too, because this is about food delivery.
And it doesn't just have to be food delivery.
They deliver other types of things as well.
But it's about delivery.
But what's interesting to me is that if I go into a fast food restaurant right, I go into a hamburger restaurant or a dumpling restaurant or what have you, and I'm rude.
I'm dealing face to face with the server at that time.
Let's say I'm rude again.
In a restaurant.
When you have face to face interactions, there's no button to press where you can block me from being a customer in your store anymore or dealing with you.
You'd have to talk to your manager.
It's just a little bit more convenient and a little bit different, because this is taking place on a digital platform as opposed to face-to-face interactions.
And if you're wondering, if you're not familiar, Meituan, this is a huge, huge, huge company.
You mentioned it, Yushan, already.
And the number of riders continues to grow.
Yeah, the number of delivery riders has grown significantly as the market for instant delivery service expands.
One Xinhua report published in early 2025, showing that the number of riders nationwide now exceeds 10 million, not only from the single platform.
So the number of Meituan riders has risen to more than 7 million, increasing at an average annual rate of nearly 20.
And another platform, Elema, has over 4 million active riders as well.
Yeah, so this is a big decision for the platform to pilot this.
And again, this isn't a nationwide thing.
This is being piloted in a few different cities around the country.
What was it like up until this decision was made, before this measure was taken?
Well before, I think for most, especially food delivery companies or platforms, they tend to favor the customer's sites more much, much more than the service provider.
Either it's the restaurant or the delivery writer's site.
This has caused some sort of a complicated scenario where a customer's single negative review or complaint could really have such an impact, or rather a direct and significant influence on the writer's earnings and the volume of orders dispatched to them which, of course, is directly connected to their monthly salary and how much they can earn through doing this job.
So nowadays they are in a way being protected, so that it's not only the customers being, let's say, favored all the time, but rather the service providers are getting their rights too.
I wonder if you have a similar expression in Chinese.
In English, we say the customer is always right.
Chinese customers is the god.
It's even stronger.
In terms of the you said before.
If a customer complained, then it would negatively impact the rider's earnings or the volume of orders.
How much do we know about the specifics of that?
Would the earnings be docked directly or meaning they would lose money because the orders, the number of orders that they received would be reduced?
And then that fine could be around like 30 yuan to 100 yuan.
That's about four dollars to 14 dollars.
For the rider if it involves in issues with like service attitude.
After maybe investigation, the penalty can even reach up to 300 yuan.
So it could be like And then that's only one order, right when you get reviews.
I mean, that might not sound like a lot of money, but that can add up very very, very quickly, That's for sure.
So up until now, The power belonged to the customer and the customer alone, and riders had to often, I guess, endure this silently when they were dealing with difficult or harsh customers.
And the behavior from customers can be extremely harsh.
That can constitute verbal abuse.
It can come in different shapes and forms.
But it can be quite serious at times.
And let's not overlook on the fact that at least here in China, there are more and more female working in the same job and also sharing the same workload, as male food delivery riders, whom I've seen quite a bit on social media platforms saying that it's been sort of a common thing for them to protect themselves like wear some sort of self-protection gears, because they've all kind of encountered sexual harassment in some cases, especially doing late-night deliveries.
So that's all forming such what the platform would identify as illegal customer behavior, in a way that they are protected from keep on delivering to this very customer for at least a year by putting them onto the blacklist.
And for the riders themselves.
There's a lot of incentive for them to not behave illegally, but at least put themselves in potentially dangerous situations.
Now, what I mean by that is that the more deliveries they do in a day, the more money they will make.
And this might cause the rider to speed beyond the speed limit or run a red light or drive in the opposite direction.
If it's going to take a long time to go down the road, cross the street legally, then come all the way back.
They might just slip in illegally.
So that kind of algorithmic pressure, if you want to call it that, is on the riders as well.
So basically, I think what we're saying here is that these riders, there's a lot of pressure on them a lot of the time, if not all the time.
And also, I think it's also about the mechanism of most of these platforms.
If you are a full-time delivery rider for this platform, and And then in China, most platforms now automatically assigns orders based on your location and also order demand in that area.
So some platforms allow riders to send an order limit or filter for nearby deliveries and they may map out the best route for you, but still you need to consider the time limit that you have.
Oh, I was gonna yeah okay, thanks for that, because I was going to ask how the system works, whether orders are just automatically assigned to the riders or whether they have a choice, kind of like a taxi driver or perhaps a DD rider, where they say oh, I'm in that area click, I'll take that.
But oftentimes, they're assigned directly to the rider.
Okay, so what are we expecting then from this new rule change?
Well, first of all, of course, there is such a customer selection rights provided to the riders where it really allows them to say no, like I mentioned earlier, to unreasonable demands and illegal customer behaviors.
And also here's the thing with the expansion, huge and fast expansion of the food delivery industry.
A lot of the times the individual rights are can be overlooked sometimes.
But I'm really glad that the industry has realized that.
And now there is such an empowerment for these writers, for them to value their work with dignity, so that they can select and choose.
Even though they're on the service provider's side.
When you say unreasonable demands from the customer's side, what do you mean an unreasonable demand?
Let's say you mentioned it earlier.
Some riders, they run the red light in order to deliver things as fast as they can.
What if it's not from the algorithm or the platform?
What if it's a direct demand? demand from the customer.
Like what?
Like ringing you and telling you, oh, are you the writer who's got my order?
Okay, I need it as fast as possible.
Please be here in five minutes.
Or, you know what?
We've got a convenience store just right downstairs.
Can you please bring me a pack of cigarette?
Something like that.
Asking them to go to a second location.
Or anything that's exceeding their one and only job to deliver your food.
Okay.
Right.
So if I'm a bad customer right and I call the delivery rider whose only job is to deliver the food within that bracketed time, the arrival will be between 915 and 937.
You'll get a window like that, right?
And the rider's job is only to deliver in that period of time.
But I asked the writer, oh, hey, go to the store and buy me some candy bars or something like that.
The writer might feel some pressure to do that because they might worry oh, if I don't do that I'm going to get a negative review from this customer and I don't have any recourse.
There's nothing I can do.
I just have to accept that complaint.
And that's problematic for the rider, but it's also problematic for the company because that's going to reduce the number of orders that might be able to be completed.
Yeah, that's a big problem.
I didn't even know that was an option for customers in the past.
But it's good that that probably will not be continuing to happen, at least not as often as it used to be.
I have a question.
So if the customer is blocked, does the customer get informed that they've been blocked or not?
So a lot of the information are indicating that the mechanism are just still in pilot stage and only one platform is piloting this kind of feature.
So after a writer blocks a customer, the platform can still assign other orders to take that customer's assign other writers.
I mean to take that customer's orders, meaning that individual blocking alone is kind of not that sufficient to systematically regulate customers' behavior.
And also, the customers will not get any inform or information from that block.
Should they be?
I would say no.
Just keep it the way it is right now.
It does no good for the customer to know that, oh, I've been blocked by this writer.
But Why?
I want to find out why.
I want to know why.
Then there will be extra communication cost or time allocated to certain staff of this very platform to explain why this happens.
That is because we have such function opened to our riders nowadays.
And maybe because of this and this and that incident, you guys are having such a dispute.
It's like unnecessary.
Yeah, you're probably looking at adding a lot more people to your customer service department if you're informing people the customers that they are being blocked.
However, if you're looking at changing the attitudes of customers, then perhaps they should be blocked.
But, that being said, you'd expect reasonable responses from the customers like oh, perhaps I was a little bit rude here.
Maybe I should reconsider how I behave.
But let's also say this.
There might be a flip side to this coin.
Not every customer complaint is out of line, right?
Sometimes delivery riders.
I've experienced this where I'll be waiting at the pickup point for my package and all of a sudden I see a message that says delivered.
And I'm thinking, are you invisible to me?
Because I'm standing right here.
And they'll do that sometimes.
In advance, before they're there.
They'll mark it as delivered before they get there.
And just maybe once or twice, it's happened where it's been like 25 minutes late.
25 minutes late?
Yep, once or twice out of like 1,000 orders.
These people do an amazing job.
But I'm just saying that sometimes customer complaints are warranted as well.
But why now?
I wonder why are they introducing this rule now?
Had things gotten to the point where it was perhaps a little bit out of hand?
Yeah.
And we're not trying to like evilize all of the customers because I think and also from the comments on the Internet we can totally see a lot of customers are supporting these kind of feature to be established.
But still, delivery writers have long faced some of these unreasonable customer demands, such as what we just mentioned before, right even verbal abuse for issues beyond their control, like even like slow meal preparation by restaurants, which is totally not their fault and they hadn't like nothing and um, no control of that.
Yeah, but the customer just assumes it's the delivery person's fault.
So the blocking feature allows riders to proactively avoid such extreme situations and also reduce job-related stress.
So this is basically a two-way protection, both on the clients, as always, and also now um such right protection is for the delivery person, individuals as well, the service provider side as well, because basically, what i think is that this role, it reflects the the food delivery industry's really big shift, like i mentioned earlier, from rapid expansion to somewhere where they start to value individuality in their, in their delivery of service providers and now that, as the sector matures, workers rights and sustainability within the whole environment have become key concerns of theirs, so that writers could sort of rely on their platform as a way for protection and support.
And when riders they no longer have to yield to unreasonable demands, they can focus on delivering efficiently and safely, which is ultimately benefiting everybody.
Yeah, and that's a cost-saving measure too for the companies.
But the big question is and now I want to come back to the point that you mentioned in the beginning a maximum of two customers blocked?
If you have three difficult customers, pick the worst two because you can't block the third one.
So is this going to make a difference or not?
You talked about netizens.
What are they saying about this?
Yeah, of course.
Some netizens also are criticizing this kind of limit, arguing that only two of them is not far not enough.
So some other noted that the functions effectiveness might be limited, as blocked orders would simply just be reassigned to other writers, right as we mentioned.
So that is why A lot of people are also saying the platform still has a lot more to do as to optimize the order allocation system after a block to prevent normal customers, in case of misjudgment, from being left without a rider, or improving mechanisms to regulate customers customer behavior by stepping in to warn and even restrict users who are repeatedly flagged by different writers for these kind of bad or malicious behavior.
I think it's a very good direction that these platforms, or rather the whole industry nowadays, are awakening to this and that perhaps in the future more modification can be made, not only on protecting the writers but also on Just notifying those who get flagged the most.
Are there going to be some sort of measurement done from the platform side on those very picky customers who get flagged by every not every most of the delivery guys assigned to him?
So that this problem let's say ideally can perhaps be dealt with from the root, instead of just changing a new person every single time once this person is flagged.
I know what you mean.
What you're saying, I guess, is that if the customer gets blocked by one rider, that That could be one incident.
Well, there's two... Right.
Okay, so there's two possibilities.
It could be an isolated incident where it was just a one-time thing, where that customer perhaps had a terrible day and they just blew up when it's out of character for them.
Or maybe they're really difficult all the time.
If they're blocked by one rider, they just get passed on to the next rider, who will probably block them.
And then the next rider who will probably block them.
So if that's the case, does anything...
Does anything really change?
Then they will receive their order or delivery later and they will absolutely realize that.
But anyway, I think that is all.
I think I'm thinking of that butterfly effect.
When you're having that little change happen in like tiny 1 in that whole thousand of orders, then maybe in the future there was going to be a change that affected by one single reason.
Yeah, I think it's a positive thing, right?
Because if the measure is put in place to give riders peace of mind and it's for their safety and it's for the efficiency of their work, then how can we say this is a this is a bad thing.
Do you complain?
Sometimes, very rarely will i do that, because i know the outcome, rather the the consequence if i do ours.
Quite severe yeah, it can be overly severe than how i would make.
Like the size of the fuss that it can create is it's.
It's bigger than how I wanted to impact the rider and myself and the platform.
So usually if it's not really dangerous for like severe cases, no.
Yeah.
And even though, like in some severe cases, let's say in some bad weathers, that they just have not that many riders and they have a lot of orders, and maybe invariably, even the platform will tell you that.
Your order may be delayed or something.
And I think most of the customers would consider that and understand that.
Yeah, most people are reasonable, right?
What about other platforms?
I'm thinking back to 2018.
And in China actually I think it was around the same time Didi, the ride-hailing service, they passed a similar measure, correct?
Back in 2018, this ride-hailing platform Didi also introduced this blacklist feature.
Passengers and drivers can at each other to a blacklist through the orders, cancellation or complaint or review page can block each other.
Of course, that's that's quite necessary, I think.
And also less little wet lies from the drivers, because nowadays I use a map quite often and this function is not yet open there.
And that sometimes, when the driver doesn't really want to pick up like very short distance orders, like the ones I usually make, He'll just call me politely and say oh, my car broke down.
When I know that he's just 100 meters away from me.
Like, dude, I'm looking at you, but fine.
Yeah.
I mean, as I mentioned...
I think it's an overall positive move because it's meant to protect the riders and it's meant to be good for everyone.
Yeah, both parties can be beneficial.
Any other measures that are taking place right now, before we finish up, to help protect riders and their rights.
Yeah, I think the overall direction is quite positive because I'm seeing both of two major delivery platforms are rolling out these kind of new measures, saying that they will gradually cancel or deduct, Which means they can be incentivized by getting there early, but they will not get punished when they're delivering late.
Oh, so yeah.
So if they miss that window of delivery time, if they're later than that up until now, they might have gotten a punishment.
But they're going to remove that punishment and instead offer an incentive to make it there on time.
Into a very kind of positive cycle for the riders, I would say.
Yeah, that's a good thing.
Very good.
Like we said, big news.
Everybody's talking about it here in the country, but you'd have to think that the riders are just high-fiving each other now thinking oh finally, I don't have to deal with that difficult customer anymore, or at least two of them per person.
