Initial signs

With half a month left until the start of the semester, it wasn't time for new students to register yet.

The students wandering around campus were mostly those who stayed behind for make-up exams or employment issues, with only a small number of others remaining.

Lin Yuan had heard people complaining about the difficulty of finding employment more than once in the cafeteria.

Lin Yuan deeply felt the current employment difficulties, but some students, while holding milk tea worth tens of yuan, were also crying about being poor, which Lin Yuan found somewhat incomprehensible.

Lin Yuan didn't want to waste time, and conveniently, the Good Group Zijin Branch had some testing permissions.

Recently, Hao Tuan Company has been trying to increase the proportion of AI in optimizing food delivery routes.

AI has long been introduced into food delivery routes, including order time calculation, price per order, dispatch logic, and so on; AI has been deeply involved in all of these.

However, Lin Yuan had delivered food himself.

Regarding the effectiveness of AI in the food delivery industry, he could only respond with a "heh."

For example: You are carrying 6 food delivery orders simultaneously.

The first five pickups go smoothly, but the last one is delayed in preparation, so what do you do?

Waiting there idly is clearly impractical, which is why there's a legend of delivery riderss cooking the dishes themselves.

But delivery riderss obviously can't cook every time, so at this point, they need to contact the station manager or backend to reassign the order to someone else.

If reassignment isn't possible, then it becomes awkward.

The 5 orders in hand can't be delayed for the sake of this one, right?

So this one order can only be ignored for now, and he can only return to run it after delivering the other 5.

This order being overdue is almost a certainty.

The customer who ordered will definitely be angry, and then a negative review will come.

This kind is the most critical "effective negative review."

For those who do exclusive delivery, one effective negative review means two hundred yuan is gone.

Lin Yuan used to do crowdsourced delivery, which was a bit better, at most he would lose the delivery fee for that one order.

However, crowdsourced delivery fees are much lower than exclusive delivery, with the only advantage being flexibility and freedom to take orders during idle time.

Therefore, the station manager gained the power to control delivery riderss.

Because the station manager can make things difficult when dispatching orders.

For example, not reassigning an order for you, or dumping a troublesome order on you halfway through.

Of course, a typical station manager wouldn't do that, because customer complaints would affect his income.

But there are always people who "find another way," like one of the station managers Lin Yuan followed—Liu Huzi.

Liu Huzi was that person's nickname; Lin Yuan didn't know his real name.

Liu Huzi, through some connections, managed exclusive and crowdsourced delivery for both the yellow and blue platforms, monopolizing a very lucrative order volume area, with hundreds of regular delivery riderss under him.

Due to the high number of orders, the overall income of delivery riderss was also higher.

Liu Huzi also had the opportunity to skim off profits.

If you didn't give Liu Huzi benefits, he had plenty of ways to make things difficult for you when dispatching orders.

Although delivery riderss causing customer complaints would also affect the station manager's income, Liu Huzi could afford it.

He only lost a small amount, while you lost your livelihood.

As long as delivery riderss didn't have as many orders at other stations as they did with him, he could be fearless.

But in Lin Yuan's view, the role of station manager was originally a product born out of the food delivery platform's cost control.

Food delivery belongs to the internet industry.

The internet industry generally sounds very high-end, but the delivery process of food delivery is not high-end at all.

Delivery is a job almost anyone can do, with almost no barrier to entry.

This led to: The high-barrier internet industry must connect with the low-barrier low-end service industry when its business is implemented.

(This "low-end" naturally carries no positive or negative connotations; it purely refers to the level of skill required.)

However, the management models for high-skill positions and low-skill positions are completely different.

It's very simple: You cannot manage a delivery riders in the same way you manage a programmer.

That is to say, this low-end service industry that must be connected cannot be integrated into the internet company's original management system.

It is certainly impossible to build an additional management system for this, because the costs cannot be held down.

This leads to the most crucial issue—cost control.

As for how to effectively control costs, Lin Yuan could figure it out with his toes: "Outsource it."

In fact, internet companies like Good Group, let alone low-barrier positions like delivery riderss, even many of their own programmers are outsourced.

"Outsourcing" is an economic issue, not within Lin Yuan's professional scope, so he cannot comment on its pros and cons.

However, because Lin Yuan transitioned from being a food delivery person to an IT professional, he is very clear about the problems in the delivery riders industry.

The outsourced delivery service is actually completely unrelated to the internet industry; it is purely a business that exchanges physical effort and time for money.

For this type of business, management costs are very sensitive, because the profit margins are inherently thin, and they cannot support more complex management processes.

Therefore, people like Liu Huzi have a space to survive.

For the Good Group platform, as long as food can be delivered and customer complaints are avoided, it is fundamentally too lazy to care about anything else.

It is best if all grudges and complaints go to station managers like Liu Huzi, and not to Good Group, as Good Group has already paid the station managers.

But people nowadays have been enlightened; this kind of operation, which has no legal issues, cannot pass the moral scale in people's hearts.

Therefore, due to the current public perception, Good Group had no choice but to find ways to rectify the situation.

As for the method of rectification...

Do they want them to invest more in management costs? Improve delivery riders benefits?

That would only happen if customers were willing to pay extra when ordering.

The reality of society is this: people who order food sympathize with delivery riderss, but when asked to pay more to improve delivery riderss' treatment, those same people complain that food delivery is getting more expensive.

Both the customers and the delivery people ultimately look to the food delivery platform, but the platform operates to make money.

Let the platform earn a little less? Fine, then my programmers and customer service will be outsourced.

Trolls always think that if one party is suppressed, the problem will be solved.

But after being tempered by both society and the system, Lin Yuan already understood: this kind of problem is actually quite similar to writing complex algorithms, because both require meticulous unraveling; it's impossible to complete an algorithm with simple addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.

Of course, the current Lin Yuan hasn't become overly empathetic just because he possesses the system; he doesn't have a strong desire to solve these social problems.

Therefore, applying AI to the food delivery industry is, first and foremost, a job for him, an opportunity to test his skills.

Secondly, if possible, out of a simple sentiment, he is naturally happy to help delivery riderss earn more money, because he has also experienced hardships and knows the difficulties involved.

Therefore, strictly speaking, the current Lin Yuan is still in a state of "focusing on his own well-being," but there is a faint hint of "benefiting the world" in his heart.