How to Get Delivery Drivers to Bring Packages to Your Door

Last year, the newly revised Express Delivery Market Management Measures officially took effect. Among its provisions, the rule that “packages must not be sent to lockers or pickup stations without user consent” sparked widespread discussion.

But this regulation seems to exist only on paper. Many consumers only realize their package has been dropped off at a station or locker after receiving a pickup code. Why is the Measure essentially a dead letter? Why do some packages still not get delivered to your door even after you’ve explicitly requested it? Many consumers who shop online probably share this confusion.

First, we have to ask: are laws and regulations always effective? Many people’s logic is that since laws exist, everyone must follow them. This is the most naive assumption.

For example, if you were born between 1980 and 2015 and you have a younger sibling, then too bad — your parents broke the law. But if you happen to be the younger sibling, it’s even worse — your very existence was illegal. Your existence violated the “basic national policy” written into the constitution in 1982: the one-child policy. Your parents broke the law, perhaps because they believed family bonds mattered more than legal rules. The state’s decision to scrap the one-child policy stemmed from the economic crisis caused by a declining population. So that’s how laws work: depending on real-world circumstances, some people follow them to the letter, while others ignore them entirely.

The Express Delivery Market Management Measures are no different. It proposed a solution but didn’t provide the economic means to solve the problem. So delivery workers at the last mile chose to universally “break the law.”

Most problems in life are actually economic problems — and the express delivery industry is a prime example.

High-quality delivery service isn’t out of reach: door-to-door delivery and next-day delivery are both achievable — provided you pay extra! During the pandemic, when imports and exports were strictly controlled, one customer asked me to ship a large box of wine from China to Finland. After he paid several thousand yuan in shipping fees, it was easily done. If premium brands like SF Express, JD Logistics, or Deppon don’t offer door-to-door service, you have every right to complain — after all, you’ve paid a premium and deserve the corresponding benefits.

However, apart from SF Express, JD, and Deppon, the “Tongda” network (STO Express, ZTO Express, YTO Express, Yunda, etc.) focuses on small-parcel business. Merchants’ shipping costs are often below 0.5 yuan per kilogram. For the small items consumers buy daily, the actual shipping fee is usually less than 3 yuan. After deducting costs at each stage of the supply chain, the last-mile courier only gets a few cents per package.

If you think it’s reasonable for a food delivery rider to earn five or six yuan per order, then expecting a courier who only earns a few cents to deliver to your door is a double standard. As long as the income is disproportionate, no amount of complaining will get a courier to deliver to your door — they’ll just quit. For a monthly salary of a few thousand yuan, why risk it? They might as well deliver food!

Previously, a platform subsidized courier companies to force drivers to deliver to consumers’ doors. But within a month, the service had practically vanished. Even though the platform subsidized door-to-door delivery, the last-mile couriers didn’t receive commensurate compensation for the extra work. Whenever they encountered orders that required door-to-door delivery, they set those packages aside and prioritized the higher-volume station pickup deliveries. Only after finishing the station runs would they deliver the door-to-door packages. As a result, the packages that needed priority delivery often arrived last. Some impatient consumers ended up picking up their packages themselves, or simply refused them. After this game of tug-of-war, the courier achieved his goal — he never wanted to deliver to the door in the first place. The platform got its promotional credit, the courier company got its shipping fee, the consumer didn’t pay extra, and the only loser was the merchant.

Everyone — consumers, e-commerce platforms, and even the national level — shares responsibility for this situation. China is a country where 600 million people have a monthly income of only 1,000 yuan, and 900 million earn less than 2,000 yuan a month. For the vast majority of consumers, they’d rather spend 15 minutes picking up their package themselves than pay an extra 5 yuan for door-to-door service.

The platforms’ responsibility lies in the fact that not all users care about that small amount of money — many are happy to pay for convenience. But most platforms or merchants won’t proactively offer a “pay extra for SF Express” option, because the psychological implication of that option would scare away a portion of potential buyers. In reality, users just need to privately contact the merchant and pay extra for the premium shipping channel — merchants are often more than happy to oblige.

Dropping packages at last-mile stations isn’t a backward delivery model — it’s the natural adjustment of the invisible hand of the market. China’s ability to bridge urban-rural divides at extremely low cost owes much to cheap express delivery. It’s built on abundant demographic dividends: when couriers can make a living delivering a hundred packages a day, all these乱象 (chaotic phenomena) will naturally disappear. The good news is that this transformation doesn’t seem far off. The bad news is that it also means the end of the demographic dividend.