The Weight of Fifty Yuan

A single Shan-song(instant delivery platform) order at my front door suddenly made me see a lot of things I usually pretend not to see.

Because her phone was on “Do Not Disturb Mode,” my mom missed the courier’s calls. He waited downstairs for a long time, unable to get through, and finally had to ask the security guard for help before he was able to reach our family. By the time I found out what had happened, he had already been standing in the cold wind for nearly an hour.

My mom later transferred him fifty yuan as compensation. The transfer went through quickly, with a short, simple note, as if she were completing a perfectly routine step. But my heart tightened for a moment. I couldn’t help wondering: Is fifty yuan really enough?

I started making clumsy comparisons: previously, when I sent something from Huangpu to Qingpu, an instant delivery cost just a bit over fifty. A takeaway lunch for me is roughly the same price. But for that courier rushing back and forth on his electric scooter, an hour of waiting plus a twenty-kilometer trip back and forth all added up to just this “fifty yuan.”

If I look at it purely from the perspective of “market price,” everything makes sense: this is how the platform sets its rates, labor is cheap to begin with, and no one is technically “breaking any rules.” But once I turn those numbers back into a concrete person, a person standing in the cold, checking his phone again and again, forced to find the security guard, afraid the system will mark him “late,” all the calculations that used to be clear suddenly stop adding up.

In China, 1.4 billion people are constantly reduced to a handful of explanations: “There are a lot of people,” “competition is fierce,” “there’s never a shortage of workers.” These phrases are used to justify countless small but very real forms of exploitation. Factory workers on assembly lines can be replaced at any time; there is always someone ready to take the security guard’s shift downstairs; food delivery riders and couriers are lined up to take each other’s jobs. And so, on all those cost spreadsheets, “labor” is often the cheapest, and the easiest item to push down as far as possible.

And I am one of the beneficiaries of this system.

I enjoy the convenience it brings me. With just a few taps on my phone, someone will travel across the city in my place; with a delivery fee that doesn’t look outrageous at all, someone quietly shoulders my time, my physical effort, and my risk for me. My cost of living is lowered and my life becomes more efficient. But at the same time, the guilt in my heart is slowly magnified. I know the reason all of this is so cheap is that so many people’s time is being forced to sell at a very low price.

In that moment, I even started to wonder if I was being “too dramatic,” or “too saintly.” After all, who agonizes this much over the price of every single delivery? Some people would say, “He chose this job himself,” or “That’s just the platform’s rate, you’re not the boss.” These lines all sound reasonable, but they still can’t soothe that small, sharp pain I feel inside.

I also thought about a seemingly more “generous” response: Should I just give more? For example, should I have given him two hundred yuan instead? But then a new worry popped up immediately:

If I give him two hundred today, will he feel even more disappointed in the future when he doesn’t meet such a customer again? Am I only offering myself temporary comfort without changing anything at all?

In this society, how much are a person’s time and effort really worth?

And within a large structure that I cannot change, how should I live so that I am neither completely numb nor completely drowned in guilt? Of course I know that by myself, I can’t change labor laws or platform algorithms, nor can I reassign the “price of time” for everyone in the city. But that doesn’t mean I can only shrug and say, “Well, that’s just how it is,” and then sleep.

These small gestures cannot change the world, but they can change this one thing: I refuse to let myself get used to seeing other people as just a kind of “cost” that can be compressed and ignored.

I am still a beneficiary of the system. I still live inside an unfair yet highly efficient structure. But I hope that at least on the short stretch of its path that runs through my life, something can be slightly different: that someone might be treated a little more like a person, just once; that someone, because of those extra few dozen yuan or a simple “I’m sorry for the trouble,” might feel that today is not quite so bad.

Is fifty yuan enough?

Perhaps what really matters is no longer that specific number.

From an economics standpoint, it might be reasonable.

From the standpoint of my own values, it will never be enough.

Photo from people.com.cn