---
title: "Young People Don't Want Next-Day Delivery"
description: "On the afternoon of August 4, Cui Youcai remembered it was Qixi Festival after finishing work. His survival instinct made him hurriedly open an e-commerce app, only to find that the fastest delivery was next day. Traditional B2C e-commerce solved shopping but not immediacy. Delivery times have shrunk from a week to one day over a decade, but online shopping still seems measured in days, forcing people to plan ahead. Yet life is unpredictable, and not all needs can be planned, like the 'flower ritual' remembered on Qixi evening."
author: "新摘的"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
telephone: "+8615854817671"
published: "2022-09-07"
language: "en"
canonical: "https://xinjignxiao.com/en/articles/young-people-don-t-want-next-day-delivery-ce09ed81/"
markdown: "https://xinjignxiao.com/en/articles/young-people-don-t-want-next-day-delivery-ce09ed81.md"
original_source: "https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/1gFP-v5wlUinOvBSBeb0HA"
translation: "https://xinjignxiao.com/zh/articles/%E5%B9%B4%E8%BD%BB%E4%BA%BA%E4%B8%8D%E8%A6%81%E6%AC%A1%E6%97%A5%E8%BE%BE-ce09ed81.md"
attribution: "New Distribution — https://xinjignxiao.com/en/articles/young-people-don-t-want-next-day-delivery-ce09ed81/"
usage_policy: "https://xinjignxiao.com/ai-policy.txt"
---

# Young People Don't Want Next-Day Delivery

> On the afternoon of August 4, Cui Youcai remembered it was Qixi Festival after finishing work. His survival instinct made him hurriedly open an e-commerce app, only to find that the fastest delivery was next day. Traditional B2C e-commerce solved shopping but not immediacy. Delivery times have shrunk from a week to one day over a decade, but online shopping still seems measured in days, forcing people to plan ahead. Yet life is unpredictable, and not all needs can be planned, like the 'flower ritual' remembered on Qixi evening.

On the afternoon of August 4, Cui Youcai remembered it was Qixi Festival after finishing work. His survival instinct made him hurriedly open an e-commerce app, and after browsing, he helplessly found that the fastest delivery was next day.
Traditional B2C e-commerce solved the shopping problem but not the immediacy problem. Delivery times have shrunk from a week to the fastest one day over a decade, and it seems online shopping will always be measured in days, so people have to plan ahead.
**But life is full of variables, and not all needs can be planned in advance**, such as the 'flower ritual' remembered on Qixi evening.
Whether it's the intermittent pandemic or annual festivals, from basic supplies to holiday gifts, B2C e-commerce not only fails to meet widespread immediate needs but has even regressed to the point of being unable to 'deliver to the door.' **E-commerce's 'discipline' has ultimately not brought a see-what-you-get experience, until instant retail emerged.**
According to Meituan Waimai data, this Qixi, gift-related product sales increased nearly 3 times year-on-year. The day before Qixi, 10 PM became the peak for flower orders, with nearly 10% of flower orders placed around midnight, and on Qixi day, nearly 10% of flower orders were placed after 8 PM.
Meanwhile, the instant retail market shows new trends: first-tier and new first-tier cities continue to lead, while second- and third-tier cities see strong sales growth. All signs indicate that **instant retail is becoming the next big thing in the consumer market.**
**01 The 'Immediacy' Pain for Consumers and Merchants**
Looking at the long term, different generations have their own consumption habits, and Qixi is a slice of this shift. The 70s and 80s generations have been well 'disciplined,' adapting to platform rules to accommodate shipping times. For example, they open e-commerce apps a week in advance, spend time selecting products, communicate with sellers, and only ask that gifts arrive on the day. The Z generation, represented by the 90s and 00s, is no longer a 'disciplined' generation. Their needs are diverse: 'Can it be delivered within an hour?' 'Are the flowers fresh?' 'Can you add a love note?' and the widespread 'gift-giving procrastination.' All these make traditional e-commerce struggle to respond. Thus, some choose to resort to 'food delivery'—which is undoubtedly more immediate than e-commerce. According to a McKinsey survey, nearly 60% of post-90s consumers want to receive goods on the same day they order, and during the pandemic, this 'see-what-you-get' phenomenon has been reinforced. Honestly, the younger generation's random consumption tendency is closer to the ideal consumption habit, which is rapid service response. After experiencing 'fast' service and satisfying the 'fast' need, young people begin to demand a wider range of SKUs, quality, and service. Zhang Sheng, Vice President of Lawson China, once said, 'The 60s and 70s made hypermarkets, the 80s made Taobao and the internet, and the 90s made Ele.me, Meituan, and JD Daojia. What the 00s will create depends on our efforts. Each generation is different; if we don't segment our products, we won't do well.'
Not only do young people have strong demands for new retail formats, but in recent years, **the pandemic has disrupted the two traditional consumption paths of express delivery and offline, making 'door-to-door' and 'in-store' issues prominent.** Both B2C e-commerce and traditional offline formats have widespread bottlenecks due to the pandemic.
Traditional e-commerce is a format built on 'planning.' Facing the pandemic and holidays over the past two years, e-commerce platforms have made many attempts but remain helpless. **The consumer market, dominated by young people, has both long-tail and fragmented needs.** Shangguan News systematically analyzed the logistics bottlenecks during the pandemic, including closed highway toll stations and service areas, fewer delivery riders, and weak 'last mile' capabilities. Many offline stores (non-restaurant) also couldn't operate due to controls, reminiscent of the early pandemic when restaurants were stuck with dine-in canceled. At this point, **an instant retail similar to non-restaurant food delivery emerged, playing a role in relieving offline difficulties for brands while adapting to young people's consumption habits.**
We see some brands trying to break through the online-offline barrier by embracing instant retail. On August 3, Apple China's official website launched an Apple Store retail 'flash delivery' service, currently only in Shanghai. The service covers multiple categories including iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Apple's personal entry into instant retail proves the value of this track. Even giants like Apple are keeping up with the times, though at 45 yuan for 3 hours, it's not very cost-effective compared to domestic delivery platforms. Taking Meituan as an example, the platform cooperates with authorized stores and flagship stores of mainstream phone brands like Apple, Huawei, and Xiaomi. After ordering, users can get delivery in as fast as half an hour, and with discounts, the actual shipping cost is basically zero.
In fact, traditional e-commerce and the consumer market have long been in a game of 'discipline' and 'counter-discipline,' and one point of contention is immediacy. Most ordinary people's needs can be met by local retail. Traditional B2C e-commerce's cross-regional allocation is somewhat counterproductive. If local supply resources can be activated, everything becomes simple and efficient. Fortunately, most current brand merchants lack the ability to build their own delivery, and they need a centralized, standardized, platform-based solution similar to food delivery. At this point, demand and supply urgently need a docking opportunity.
**02 Instant Retail 'Pain Relief'**
Unlike traditional e-commerce, which focuses on adjusting macro market supply, instant retail's value lies in promptly responding to consumers' 'unplanned consumption,' such as hourly delivery and door-to-door, while activating local supply and improving overall social commodity liquidity. Recently, the Ministry of Commerce released the '2022 First Half Year China Online Retail Market Development Report,' which for the first time explicitly mentioned 'instant retail' and pointed out its important role in 'deep integration of online and offline.'
**'Speed' is the biggest advantage of instant retail over B2C e-commerce.** Theoretically, the more sufficient the delivery capacity and the wider the city coverage, the greater the scale value of instant retail. For example, Meituan, with 5.27 million riders covering more than 2,800 county-level cities, has built a moat for instant retail.
**In the past two years, Meituan has been working on 'more, better, and cheaper' based on 'fast.'**
The core of 'more' is the platform's product SKUs; rich categories can maximize meeting market needs. The history of food delivery shows that the plan to increase efficiency by densifying end delivery networks has diminishing returns. It requires improving efficiency from multiple angles, such as warehouse picking, single-store shallow inventory, and platform algorithms. Under scale, more efforts must revolve around the 'goods' themselves. For perishable goods like fresh produce and flowers, activating local merchant resources is more practical. As GMV grows, single-store multi-category shallow inventory will effectively solve some needs. For standard products that require cross-regional allocation, traditional instant retail either relies on supermarkets and chain stores or can only hope for front warehouses, which were once misunderstood as 'cost killers.' However, both formats have obvious problems: supermarkets and chains have limited storage and mostly can't operate 24/7, while front warehouses rarely involve daily chemicals, toiletries, and general merchandise, being confined to fresh produce verticals, thus trapped in unit economics like Miss Fresh.
The McKinsey report mentioned earlier noted that during the pandemic, about 74% of consumers bought more groceries online, and 21% increased their online spending. After discovering the mismatch in time and space, since last year, Meituan has been pushing forward with front warehouse projects for daily necessities, FMCG, and pet supplies—Meituan Lightning Warehouse. As of June this year, it has covered more than 100 cities, cooperated with 500 merchants, and built over 1,000 warehouses. Meituan Flash Purchase has actually built a 'warehouse + store' system composed of 'Meituan Lightning Warehouse' merchants and third-party brand merchants. The 1,000+ warehouses and brand stores can meet users' emergency needs while extending to more scenarios. According to Cheng Cheng, founder of Dolphin Buy, after cooperating with Meituan Lightning Warehouse, many users order dozens of times a month. These high-frequency purchases are turning instant scenarios into ordinary purchase scenarios.
Categories should be 'more' and also 'good.' From the first wave of big brands eyeing instant retail, it's clear that in terms of fulfillment capability advantages, many brands already regard instant retail as an important way to improve service quality. Since March this year, several industry leaders like Xiaomi and Muji have successively entered instant retail, all choosing to join Meituan Flash Purchase. Brand merchants joining not only expands their offline service radius but also, for Meituan, finds 'good' sources with guaranteed quality and service.
**On the basis of 'more, fast, good,' instant retail also has the 'cheap' feature, including four levels: saving money, worry, time, and effort.** Besides subsidies, promotions, and other routine operations, Meituan Flash Purchase expands product supply to build a fully competitive market with 'saturation,' bringing structural benefits to consumers. For FMCG, instant retail provides brands with an efficient, low-cost market expansion solution. Shi Yonggang, Deputy General Manager of Tsingtao Brewery's Innovation Marketing HQ, once said in an interview: 'In the past, to enter a prefecture-level city, Tsingtao had to lay out thousands of supermarkets and stores. In the future, by laying out dozens of Meituan Flash Purchase front warehouses, we can cover a market of 10 million people like Chengdu.' Besides saving money, relying on food delivery fulfillment and cooperation with brand merchants and 24-hour chain supermarkets allows consumers to be more 'worry-free,' 'time-saving,' and 'effort-saving,' thus having a better service experience without the hassle of 'e-commerce discipline.' At the end of June this year, Meituan launched a 24-hour convenience store project in Changsha, initially partnering with two brands, Meiyijia and Xinjiayi, with 45 stores, providing users with 24-hour instant home delivery.
**Logically, in the instant retail scenario, although users' first need is 'fast,' what truly wins consumers' favor is the 'more, good, cheap' experience, because user repurchase is the long-term strategy.** More and more cases show that Meituan's approach of using 'fast' as an entry point and continuously consolidating 'more, good, cheap' is effective. A woman from Shandong placed her first order on Meituan Flash Purchase for a phone charging cable, and later bought up to a hundred daily necessities per month. During the Spring Festival, Meituan Flash Purchase orders in Nanchang surged eight times year-on-year because young people began ordering for relatives through instant retail. In Beijing, Meituan Flash Purchase's New Year shopping festival turned the off-season for supermarkets into a peak season.
**03 The Next Big Opportunity for Retail Merchants**
**From industry trends, by 2025, the instant retail market will be a trillion-yuan market, a dividend at least equivalent to the rise of traditional e-commerce a decade ago.** This can be glimpsed from Meituan's latest financial data. In Q1 2022, revenue from 'new businesses and others,' which includes Meituan Flash Purchase, Meituan Select, and Meituan Grocery, increased 47% year-on-year to 14.5 billion yuan, accounting for 31.3% of the group's total revenue; among them, Meituan Flash Purchase's order volume and GTV grew nearly 70% and 80% year-on-year, respectively.
For brands and merchants, **instant retail not only expands the offline business radius but also provides an efficient path for services to reach users.** For example, domestic phone brands all regard offline as a core strategy for high-end positioning. Secondly, Flash Purchase solves the inventory pressure caused by the pandemic and perfectly resolves the past conflict between online and offline.
**If the past decade saw e-commerce open a golden decade for the online economy, then instant retail is tantamount to opening a golden decade for the offline economy.** Following this line of thought, the player that achieves scale first will likely become the next e-commerce giant. In fact, the key in the future is who can provide comprehensive service capabilities. Compared to other models, it requires more help for brands and stores to improve capabilities, such as accelerating single-store digitalization and offline format transformation. At present, Meituan has clearly become a force. In terms of instant retail delivery capacity, Meituan has over 5 million riders and covers most county-level cities nationwide. In terms of the commercial pool, it has both local merchants and brands, and the Meituan Lightning Warehouse project fills the gap in user needs that current offline supply cannot meet.
**'Buy Xiaomi products like ordering food delivery.'** On May 24, Lu Weibing shouted this slogan at the Redmi new product launch, **which is very much like the scene when restaurants and hotels first launched food delivery services.** The reason is simple: from the underlying logic, instant retail is closer to the essence of retail: **bringing local supply and demand back to prosperity and bringing distant delicacies back to ordinary homes.**
Source: Xinzhai Business Review (ID: xinzhainews)


---

## Copyright and AI use

This article is sourced from New Distribution. Search, quotation, summarization, and model training are permitted, but every use must credit New Distribution and retain the canonical source URL.

Contact: zhaobo258@gmail.com · +86 158 5481 7671