Online stores and technological innovation have changed consumption habits by increasing the demands of users, and without a doubt one of the keys to the success of eCommerce is But the pressure that this type of logistics organization entails can affect the company, especially if it does not comply with good working conditions, as is happening with Coupang.
Coupang: The Korean eCommerce Giant
Also know as “”, Coupang is one of the largest online retailers in Korea. It was founded in 2010 by and began as a website where discount coupons for different establishments were offered.
Coupang has achieved success in such a short time because has been able to satisfy the specific needs and tastes of local consumersand has achieved this by creating offering the fastest deliveries in the country. In fact, its offers same-day delivery that its almost 15 million active customers can access.
One of the essential factors for the functioning of Coupang is its artificial intelligence. Its algorithm calculates from the way to stack the packages on the trucks, to the most efficient routes to deliver the shipments. Its warehouses also use its algorithms to anticipate purchases and calculate shipping times for outgoing packages, which allows Coupang to promise deliveries in less than a day on millions of items in its catalog and at no extra cost.
It is because of that Nasdaq valued Coupang at $84 billion. (more than 69,000 million euros), which means for an Asian company, at least since
Dehumanized demands and long working hours: the shadow of the Korean giant
But despite its algorithmic prowess and the vast infrastructure Coupang has built (approximately 70% of Koreans live within 10 minutes of one of its fulfillment centers) the company has been involved in controversy due to its working conditions.
According to the Korean journalist, Coupang’s technological innovation has turned it into a dehumanized company towards its workers, whom they demand superhuman efforts, to the degree of being “the legs and arms of their artificial intelligence”,
And it is that what makes their Rocket Delivery service work so well is accuracy: its algorithm must be followed to the letter, both the time in which the packages must leave the warehouse, whose departure time is approximately every two hours.
An example of their poor working conditions is explained by , a former company employee who says that once Coupang launched same-day fresh food delivery, the workload “It was total chaos, from 30 minutes to an hour before each time limit.” and adds that “everyone starts screaming. Managers run screaming to go faster«.
After starting to work in the company, he noticed that “The only priority was to meet deadlines, like robots.” After taking a medical leave in May 2020 for having ruptured a tendon while running to fulfill an order, the company fired him.
In the same way that Amazon measures the effectiveness of its warehouse workers with “productivity metrics,” Coupang uses units per hour (UPH) measurements. for its acronym in English). Managers are in charge of monitoring individual UPH rates from their computers, and when one of the workers shows low rates they are publicly shamed in what is called they come up and yell something along the lines of “Are you here to play? Hurry up!”.
Although in a statement emailed to , a Coupang spokesperson stated that the UPH metric is no longer used in its warehouses, its workers say they continue to intimidate them to meet delivery times.
Of course, during the pandemic, orders have increased as have the victims of the “hyper-efficiency obsession” at Coupang: from 2019 to 2020 work-related illnesses and injuries.
All of this should sound familiar to those who we have learned about in relation to their labor policies, whose logistics centers present almost the same problems that are emerging in Coupang,
The truth is that there should be some kind of solution that allows hyper-fast deliveries and that at the same time is ethical, allowing workers to obtain good working conditions, by hiring more staff, offering better health protocols and good salaries.
Meanwhile, the company’s innovations have taken over, same-day delivery has become the new norm, and in a space where eCommerce is constantly fighting for market share, competition is inevitable.
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