Meituan's smart food drawers improve safety and convenience at Communication University of China, but face challenges like overcrowding, shared phone number confusion, and inefficient customer service.
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Yanan Sun, a senior production management major at Communication University of China, went to a smart food drawer to pick up her take-out during the mealtime rush on Oct. 16, 2022 only to find that the last four digit of her phone had opened three different drawers. She checked the take-out list numbers one by one before to find her own takeaway which took her twice as much time as usual.
The smart food drawers started earlier in 2022 by Meituan to meet the unique needs of contactless delivery: independent storage, heat preservation and disinfection. Currently, most college campuses in Beijing are equipped with smart food drawers. According to the CUC official WeChat account, CUC put the double-sided smart food drawers into use in June 2022. They are located outside the west gate, the north gate, the Zhonglan apartment and the Bangzijing apartment.
Students say the smart food drawers on campus have greatly improved the safety of takeaway and the taste of food.
"Now that I put the take-out in the drawer, I won't worry about the take-out being stolen anymore, and because the drawer can keep warm, I can do my homework first and don't have to rush," Ziyuan Lv, the journalism junior says.
Food delivery driver Hongmin Cui agrees. "The biggest benefit is that it’s more convenient. Before I needed to wait for customers to pick up, now directly I put food in the drawer, that can save a lot of time for me," he says.
Although the installation of smart food drawers brings some conveniences, there are also problems. During peak meal times, especially between 11:50 a.m. and 1 p.m., the drawers fill up, resulting in orders being left on the floor or on a single table.
Delivery workers sometimes wait at the door for customers to pick up their meals, but this greatly increases delivery times. Some deliverymen pass students' take-out to security guard or students nearby and ask them to help put it on the table. Others are just put them on the ground through the railing bars.
“When I see a table full of similar things, I have to rely on the list attained to find my own take-out. It’s very difficult. I need to identify them one by one," Sun says.
In addition, there exist system vulnerabilities. Since the smart food drawers can only be opened by entering the last four digit of a phone number, students with the same number are extremely easy to confuse when opening. And when it comes to these problems, students communicate with customer service through the supporting WeChat mini app is very inefficient.
"We contacted Meituan's customer service in advance, but the results were unsuccessful," Sun says, "I felt a little angry."
Because the customer service is all answered automatically by robots instead of human processing, students often have to solve their own like Sun.
The installation of smart food drawers has indeed brought convenience to students and deliverymen, but at the same time, there are also urgent problems to be seen and solved.
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