China Delivery App Wars Lead to Dirt Cheap Meals

It’s always a good day when you get an unexpected promo email from your favorite food delivery app offering a discount. Hell, you were going to order delivery anyway, so an extra 10 percent off or whatever is just gravy. Except that over in China, they’d likely be laughing that measly discount code off their couch. In fact, they might not even bat an eye at a 25 or 50 percent discount. Because apparently, the war for delivery customers has become so intense that some people are scoring entire meals for the Chinese equivalent of a penny.

Much like in the States, the Chinese have become enamored with having their food brought to them, and just as plenty of American companies have sprung up to fill the demand, companies in China are also battling it out to be food-delivery king. The three big players are Ele.me, Meituan, and Didi, according to Quartz, and these three brands all have money to burn. Ele.me was recently acquired by Alibaba, sometimes referred to as the Chinese equivalent of Amazon. Meanwhile, Meituan has received substantial investments from another tech giant, Tencent. But it’s Didi who is currently shaking up the market.

Didi could be thought of as the Uber of China. More accurately, they're the company that soundly defeated Uber in China and bought out their business there. And just as Uber started offering UberEats, Didi just began offering food delivery last week, launching in the city of Wuxi. Their offers to undercut the competition have led to some pretty impressive social media posts. Similar to the series Extreme Couponing, customers have taken to showing off just how little they’ve been managing to pay by taking advantage of these deals. You can find examples of a 59-yuan order for just ￥1.8, a 27-yuan order for chicken rice that ended up costing the Chinese equivalent of a single penny, and a nearly 31-yuan order that was completely free.

However, Chinese delivery fans definitely want to hop on this gravy train while they can. As Quartz explained last year, when Didi and Uber were battling it out for the mobile taxi market, the competition drove down prices significantly, but once Didi emerged victoriously, prices shot back up higher than ever before. Maybe now’s a good time to start throwing some of the chose cheap chicken rices in the freezer?