Cheap labour and the 10-minute trap

Over time, quick commerce will start to look like what it should have been all along: organised retail with better software. Warehouses will get bigger. Baskets will get heavier. Speed will become a paid choice, not the default

Tap an app, and a pack of batteries, a tub of ice cream, or a single bathroom towel appears at your door within ten minutes. Speed is the headline. If convenience is seduction then Zomato’s Blinkit, Swiggy’s Instamart or Zepto, peddlers of quick commerce, are the masters of that seduction.

FILE PHOTO: Swiggy gig workers talk to each other during a promotional event in Mumbai, India, October 14, 2024. REUTERS/Francis Mascarenhas/File Photo (REUTERS)

But when the government stepped in earlier this month to protect gig workers—following a massive strike by riders—the spotlight shifted. Speed wasn’t under scrutiny. It was the ugly economic bargain that was the underpinning of quick commerce. The industry’s panic that followed was predictable. Because if delivery riders are paid fairly, insured properly, and protected from the elements, the math stops working for the owners.

Except, here is the secret the industry doesn’t want you to dwell on: Ten-minute delivery was never the core business. It was just the hook. Dipayan Baishya, an independent retail consultant who has spent years at the ringside of Indian retail, puts it bluntly. “You don’t make serious money selling milk and bread,” he says. “The real money is in everything else.”

Groceries are the bait used to manufacture habits. Once you’re hooked on the dopamine hit of instant arrival, the platforms pivot. They start selling you hair dryers, phone chargers, and frying pans. These items carry margins that milk can only dream of. In simple terms: groceries train your brain; non-food items fill the bank.

This explains why companies are moving away from the obsession with shaving seconds off the clock. They have bigger ambitions. They want to replace Amazon and Flipkart for your daily needs. If they can move you from waiting two days to waiting twenty minutes, the market is theirs.

To pull this off, platforms have carpet-bombed our metros with ‘dark stores’—small, windowless warehouses tucked in residential lanes. The closer they are to your gate, the faster the fix. But this is where the costs explode. Rent, inventory, and capital get locked up in hundreds of locations. Baishya argues that real estate, not wages, is the true hidden monster here. To promise ultra-fast delivery everywhere, you need a warehouse within a couple of kilometres of every customer. And that is an obscenely expensive way to run a shop.

There is, of course, a more sensible way. Fewer, larger warehouses serving wider zones. Deliveries in two hours instead of ten minutes. One rider carrying ten packages instead of one rider racing against a countdown timer for a single bottle of Coke. Costs would plummet. Sanity would return.

But sanity doesn’t make for catchy advertising. So, the industry took a different route. It pushed the risk downward. It rebranded delivery workers as “partners.” In the real world, this means the rider brings the vehicle, pays for the fuel, absorbs the accident risk, and faces a penalty for every red light they didn’t jump. There is no career ladder. There is only the algorithm.

Baishya doesn’t mince words. “If 80 percent of your workforce is on contract, that’s not innovation. That’s labour arbitrage. You’re building a shiny consumer experience on a workforce that carries all the insecurity.”

Enter Hari TN, executive chairman of STEER World and a veteran of the retail wars from his days at Big Basket. He offers a reality check and compares quick commerce to the tobacco industry. You can’t ban cigarettes because the demand is bone-deep. So, the government focuses on banning the ads instead.

Quick commerce is no different. “The harmful effect of 10-minute delivery is not severe enough for the government to do anything more than preventing explicit advertising,” Hari says. As long as we demand speed, companies will find a way to supply it. They might stop saying “10 minutes,” but they’ll find a hundred other ways to communicate the same promise.

Besides, the damage is done. The habit is formed. We don’t need the billboards anymore; our thumbs already know where to go.

So, where does this end? Not with a ban, but with a reckoning. Quietly, the adjustment has already begun. Minimum order values are creeping up. Delivery fees are appearing. If you want it “instantly,” you pay a premium. If you can wait an hour, you get a discount. Urgency is finally being priced, rather than assumed.

Over time, quick commerce will start to look like what it should have been all along: organised retail with better software. Warehouses will get bigger. Baskets will get heavier. Speed will become a paid choice, not the default.

And we have to face the question we’ve been avoiding: Should our convenience depend on a workforce that absorbs all the downside while we enjoy the upside? Because the fact of the matter is, quick commerce didn’t misjudge what we wanted. It just mispriced what it cost to get it to us. The government may not be able to ban the habit, but it has forced a confrontation with a basic truth. Ten minutes was never the USP–cheap, disposable labour was.