Yesterday was dry cleaning day, which, in almost any other city would mean that I would grab all my dirty clothing to be dry-cleaned, get into my car, and haul it down to the nearest dry-cleaning shop that I could find with horrendous 3-star Yelp reviews, and find a passable coupon that made my whole order of 12 items less than $100 USD.
This being Beijing, China, in the middle of the biggest O2O craze and with a billion "O2O" startups cash-flush with venture funding, I did none of that. I had someone come to my house and pick it all up, or at least I attempted to.
Sidenote:
What is O2O, for the unacquainted? It stands for "Online to Offline" or vice versa. In essence, it's the idea of taking what was originally a traditional business (say, Dry Cleaning store) and turning it into an online business (say, Dry Cleaning app that calls a guy to haul away your dirty clothing).
So here's how it's all supposed to work: you grab your favorite dry-cleaning "app" (really, it's an HTML5 app that's hiding inside wechat / AliPay -- I used the AliPay variant, which was not as good a user-experience) and say "I want someone to come pick stuff up!" Then they give you a time range, say "14:00-16:00" and you wait. All good right? Yup! It would be fantastic, except at 15:40, I got a text and call telling me that my pick-up guy wasn't going to make it, and perhaps we could reschedule for 16:00-18:00. As 18:00 ticked around, that became 22:00, and around 21:40, I got a call telling me that they wouldn't be able to make it.
I mean, okay, now I've wasted a perfectly good day waiting for someone to pick up my dry-cleaning. I would call this a dry-cleaning/O2O fail. In the end, we (meaning, my very persuasive girlfriend) convinced the guy to come and pick up our stuff - that's where the fun begins.
1. He can't find where we are
There are plenty of good map tools in China that have good auto-fill description functionality, but as a deliveryman running around with bundles of clothing, I don't think it's something they're actively using. Besides, it was 10pm and I'm sure the poor guy had been at this for hours already (their shift ends at midnight).
He fixed this by calling us and us providing him with a verbal description. Decidedly non-online.
2. There was too much paperwork
You'd think that with such a digital concept, they would have done away with all the paperwork, but nooooo. We still had to write down our information on slips of carbon copy paper to verify that we had given him certain items. I understand why there might be some value in terms of having a record of the transaction, but still - way too much work and unnecessary writing when the app has all the info.
3. Too many promotions
There were dozens of promotions going on, effectively making the cost of the service something like $2 USD per item. But this also meant a lot of finagling trying to get the right combination of promotions/orders/bags. In the end, the result was quite cheap, but this poor guy was at our doorstep trying to handle all this stuff while his kid was at home waiting for him to get home to have dinner -- at 10pm on a Saturday night. Not great work-life balance.
Anyway - I'm hoping that they'll improve the experience, because with that level of difficulty, it is almost easier to just go to the store with all my dirty clothing...
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