This has led increased delivery times and sporadic store closures across localities in Delhi, Gurgaon, Noida, Faridabad and Ghaziabad, people aware of the developments said.
A Blinkit executive told ET that the company is adding more delivery partners as average order volumes are improving gradually even though they remain below the pre-protests levels.
“There are several new delivery partners that are being onboarded every day to meet the demand, which has sustained throughout the protests,” the person said. “Some of the older riders who were protesting have also returned to work. We saw a small blip in customer demand as the stores were opening up, but it returned quickly enough.”
Approximately 800-900 orders per day per dark store were delivered on an average in Delhi-NCR before the protests began in early April, the person added.
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In the last week of April, Blinkit had circulated a special incentive-based rate card valid for 10 days for some stores in Delhi and Noida, which said delivery executives could earn between Rs 700 and Rs 1,200 on fulfilment of certain order milestones, in an attempt to increase the number of riders.ET had reported on April 25 that around 1,000 delivery partners of Blinkit had started working for rival quick-commerce platforms. This happened while platforms started witnessing a surge in orders in the region after Blinkit’s dark stores became inactive during the delivery worker protests.
On April 18, ET reported that Tata-owned BigBasket, Nexus Venture Partners-backed Zepto and Swiggy’s Instamart saw a 25-50% surge in daily orders in the days following the protest.
An emailed query sent to Zomato did not elicit a response until press time Monday.
Blinkit had announced that it would pay delivery executives a minimum of Rs 15 per trip with a distance-based component, moving away from a fixed Rs 25 per delivery and peak-hour incentive of Rs 7 per trip. Blinkit’s delivery workers have been protesting against this change, saying it reduces their earnings.
The protest had forced several dark stores, or micro warehouses, of Blinkit across Delhi, Gurgaon, Noida, Faridabad and Ghaziabad to shut down for a few days. Blinkit has around 200 of these warehouses in Delhi-NCR, from where it delivers goods to customers within a 2-3 km radius of each store.
On April 20, Zomato told the stock exchanges that the recent disruption at Blinkit had a revenue impact of less than 1% on the quick-commerce unit during the ongoing quarter. “We had to shut down some stores for a few days to ensure safety of our employees at stores and the delivery partners. Most of these stores have now resumed operations,” it had said.
On account of lack of enough delivery executives, the company had also permanently closed a few stores in Gurgaon and Delhi, and had deregistered the riders affiliated with those stores.