Why Mexico’s delivery workers are ditching food for packages

Israel Valencia had spent half a year as a food delivery worker for Rappi when a colleague mentioned an e-commerce package distribution gig.

His interest was piqued. “You waste a lot of time waiting for an order on Rappi,” Valencia, 46, told Rest of World. As a single father to a working 23-year-old, he valued being able to clock out before 4 p.m. to make dinner.

In April, Valencia joined DSP Solutions & Services, a last-mile logistics company that delivers orders from Chinese retail giant Alibaba. Now, six days a week, he delivers between 30 and 80 packages containing products from AliExpress, Alibaba’s e-commerce platform, for 15 pesos (about 80 cents) apiece.

The payment for each package is lower than what Valencia made per order on Rappi, but the volume of work is at least three times higher, helping him make more money while working fewer hours.

As Chinese e-commerce platforms gain popularity in Mexico, hundreds of gig workers have over the past year ditched delivery apps to work with last-mile logistics companies that deliver packages for AliExpress and Temu. This work is faster, allows them to make more money, and offers greater flexibility, workers in Mexico City told Rest of World.

Workers “only need to go to a warehouse, receive a set of packages, [and] plan their delivery route,” Shaira Garduño, gender secretary of the National Union of App Workers, which represents delivery workers, told Rest of World . “That’s it, they’re done.”

AliExpress is currently the fourth most-downloaded shopping app in Mexico, surpassing Amazon, according to app insights provider Data.ai. The company’s monthly app usage on Android devices in Mexico grew by 12.9% in the past year, according to data analysis company Similarweb . The appeal of Chinese platforms is so large that local retailers, worried they can’t keep up with their ultralow prices, have accused them of unfair competition and of bypassing import taxes.

Logistics companies like Estafeta, DHL, and Fedex usually charge e-commerce platforms like Amazon and MercadoLibre an average of 120 pesos ($​6.50) per package, Óscar Juárez Franco, head of last-mile operations at Grupo Traxión, a delivery company in Mexico, told Rest of World. But Temu, Shein, and AliExpress generally do not pay above 30 pesos ($1.60) apiece, he said.

To accommodate the lower rates, Mexican logistics companies have developed a more cost-effective system: They hire gig workers to deliver the cheap Chinese e-commerce packages handled by Asian logistics companies, often paying them less than a dollar per package, employees from Mexican last-mile companies told Rest of World .

Orders from Alibaba, for example, are brought in by Cainiao, Alibaba’s delivery arm, which opened a distribution center in Mexico in 2022. Cainiao launched a charter flight route from Shenzhen to Mexico City last December, “streamlining cross-border logistics to cater to the surging order volumes on AliExpress in Mexico,” according to the company’s monthly newsletter.

Eduardo Bonilla, DSP Solutions & Services’ founder and CEO, told Rest of World that Alibaba executives approached him late last year to deliver AliExpress items through Cainiao. Bonilla said his company is one of about 30 partners that work with Cainiao in Mexico. Altogether, they deliver about a million packages each week.

Several last-mile logistics companies have been poaching gig workers from food delivery and ride-sharing platforms through Facebook groups, word of mouth, and by recruiting them directly on the streets, logistics employees told Rest of World.

Cainiao did not respond to a request for comment from Rest of World .

Every day, before the sun rises, Bonilla and his operations team arrive at Cainiao’s warehouse, located about an hour away from Mexico City. They load up as many as 3,000 packages into a van, arranging them according to postal codes before taking them to DSP Solutions & Services’ warehouse. There, they assign bundles of packages to the 60 or so regular gig workers who line up outside. After collecting their packages, the workers fan out across the city by car, motorcycle, bicycle, and on foot, their routes limited to specific boroughs.

For some of them, however, delivering packages for Chinese e-giants is beginning to lose its luster.

At times, the workers have to wait for clients to sign for packages — failing which they must return to the same address. The pay, according to workers like Agustín Monsreal Saldaña, is not as good as it once was. Monsreal Saldaña, a 35-year old gig worker who switched over from delivering food orders for Rappi to ferrying packages for AliExpress in January, told Rest of World that in some parts of Mexico City, the pay has gone down from 15 pesos to 10 pesos per package — a result, he said, of an oversupply of gig delivery workers.

“These companies are like, take it or leave it,” he said.

Despite these challenges, Monsreal Saldaña said he’s sticking to package deliveries. “I got looked down upon when I worked delivering food,” he said, adding that he often had to deal with rushed restaurant staff and annoyed customers. So far, AliExpress clients haven’t been rude to him. “That’s why I don’t think I’ll ever go back to [food delivery] apps.” ▰

Daniela Dib is a Rest of World reporter based in Mexico City.