This Is How a Locked-Down Shanghai Apartment Gets Food

is just a logistics expert for all. I mean, I am joking, but there there there are a lot of people in China specifically that have been forced into becoming actual logistics experts because of the lockdowns that happened going on now for in some cases over a month in places like Shanghai. Yeah, this is a this is a really good point. So when people joke about everyone becoming an expert, usually they just mean they're an expert on

Twitter or whatever. But for people who have to think about how do you get food or how do you distribute food and other key supplies during a mass lockdown, becoming a logistics expert actually is not just about tweeting. It's about serious steaks. Yeah. So, just to set the stage, various parts of Shanghai have been in lockdown again in some cases for I think up to six weeks something like that. The citywide lockdown has been ongoing for about

a month since the start of April. And what's been happening during that is, first of all, the government does deliver some groceries and needed supplies to people, but residents who are affected by the lockdown can also try to organize their own deliveries of essentials. And it's a phenomenon called group buying. It's something that's actually existed in China

for a while now. It's not necessarily lockdown specific, but it has seen a I don't want to say a renaissance, but it has become a very vital part of actually getting supplies. So today I'm very excited we're going to be speaking with someone who has been personally involved in group buying for their residential complex, someone who has had to learn the intricacies of logistics and practice them on a day to day basis. This is it is gonna

be really interesting. There's been a lot of I've seen various threads of people talking about what's available and going on the apps that they normally used to buy groceries, and every once in a while they are able to find something, but often not, sometimes are able to get a little bit of fresh food, and people post images of what they're able to get in. But how this is all working, what the actual processes, how the big companies and uh the sort of delivery system is working.

I still don't have a great understanding. So I'm looking forward to hearing how what's going on in practice, yep, and it might become information that's more useful to even more people at the moment, because of course there is a lot of chatter that Beijing might go into lockdown soon as well. And we are recording this on April, So without further ado, let's bring on our guest. We're

going to be speaking with David Fishman. He's a senior manager at the consulting firm Lantau Group over in Hong Kong, may my former abode, and he's currently based in Shanghai. So David, thanks so much for coming on, all thoughts, thanks for having me. Guys, Maybe just to begin with, could you maybe set the scene for us, what exactly

is group buying in China? Um? Yeah, sure so, and its most pure basic economic sense, I guess group buying is a bunch of people getting together and using the power of volume to UH to secure a good deal, to secure a lower price or to incentivize a vendor or a supplier of something to maybe service an area that they wouldn't normally at a price that they wouldn't normally, because now you have the power of a larger group

of people all buying together. Well, can you, for our listeners to set the scene, describe roughly your living situation, like how big of a building is it, Like how many unit residences and a little bit about like a sort of like day to day pre pre lockdown, what your current environment is like, Yeah, sure, So, I mean I live in an apartment community in Shanghai, a pretty normal standard i'd say middle class maybe upper middle class

apartment community. There's there's twenty five floors in this building. Each floor has I think seven units, uh, and our apartment block has two buildings like that. It's it's on the smaller side, I would say, definitely for an apartment community in China. So we've got twenty five times seven times two is how many households we have an hour's yeah, yeah, And you know, some people are living in Shangha has got a big variety of different types of architecture and

different types of living conditions. Some people are living in these massive, sprawling thirty thirty buildings times thirty stories type places. Uh, and other people are living in you know, much older construction, much older buildings. Maybe their whole community has just you know, eight households. So when the city first went into lockdown or when you were first affected, what was the supply situation? Like,

what was your initial reaction. Did you immediately go out, you know, as we all did in Hong Kong and the very early days of and start buying toilet paper and rice and things like that. Did did you have time to stock up? The folks over in Putong had about a day or two uh notice, and that meant we had about a day or two plus four days, so we had about six days notice. I've been through.

I mean I was in shen Jen in and so we had a lockdown of sorts in shen Jen But that was that was different because we were able to leave the house and go out and buy groceries, you know, once every two days or something like that. The grocery stores were still functioning. Uh, there were still some deliveries going on. So it was a cessation of activities, but it wasn't a full you know, stay inside your apartment community, stay inside your apartment all the time. So this time around,

we bought some stuff. We went out and you know, picked up a few things just to make sure we had a normal amount of food, but not that much because you know, it's only four days originally and it didn't seem like, you know, we didn't think at the time that it was going to be at ten or a fifteen or a twenty day or were you know, we're at twenty six days now. So we bought, i would say, a reasonable amount of food for you know, four days of not being able to get your favorite stuff.

And that's about it. What did they tell you or when when when they say, okay, you're going to lock on? Like, what did they established as the rules? How are they communicated and how are they enforced? So when it came to what does a lockdown mean, uh, that was communicated

really through kind of municipal level announcements. We understood already from other buildings and compounds that have had this quote unquote lockdown that it would mean that they're the barrier between their compound and that the street would probably be closed and they'd say, hey, you know, you can't come by here. There's going to be some type of shelf there for delivery drivers and packages to be placed there,

and then you can come and pick it up. And we've got this kind of membrane between your big front gate and the outside world. So that's that's what we understood lockdown to be at the beginning. That was communicated through through you know, municipal level announcements and then kind of propagated down to individual community levels, the lowest organization level being you know, the neighborhood committee or the local committee.

So the local committee at that point, UH used kind of people that they knew in the building already and volunteers and kind of the power of people adding people to pull everyone in our building into a we chat group, UH, an instant messaging we chat group that we could use to notify everybody, you know, at this time on this day, we're going to be entering into our lockdown. So once the group we chat group was set up, how long was until people were doing group buying for supplies? How

did that get started? By the time I was pulled into the big group we chat group, we had already established a group buying group, a separate group buying group. So we wouldn't clutter up the main group. So maybe I guess it was probably immediate. Uh, and and so we said, yeah, the big group that should be used for just announcements about testing and lockdowns and things like that, let's let's keep the group buying and all that commercial activity in our group buying groups. So it was pretty

much immediate. But what happened because I've seen conflicting reports about what is even possible and people talk about going on the various grocery apps and sometimes they say, oh, there's nothing available, there's nothing that can be delivered. I can't get through. Sometimes people talk about there is a little bit. It's one thing to be able to buy, say you want to buy in a group, but what's available and what has the process been like? Yeah, there

was definitely an evolution to that. So remember the first couple of days, it was already planned, right, everybody had bought four or five days of groceries, and even on the second day there was a government parcels. So nobody was really freaking out at day two or day three

or even day four. It was when the cases were still rising, say day four, day five, and our lockdown had him been lifted, and it had become increasingly hard to use the grocery delivery apps because you know, the first couple of days, people had stockpiles, they had food stored up, they weren't necessarily ordering food that day, so you could still get orders through the couple main grocery delivery apps that were available. But day four, day five, everybody was trying to use them and it was just

a huge bottleneck. At that same time, most of the group by vendors hadn't quite responded to the growing demand yet, So at that moment you weren't getting anything through the standard grocery delivery apps, and group by offers were pretty limited. There's group by platforms out there that are always offering stuff, but they couldn't get stuff into Shanghai, and the phenomenon of the sho High only group buy offer hadn't really

emerged yet. So there was a couple of days, you know, I would say like the sixth, the seventh for us, where there was a lot of real concern because it just didn't seem like any avenues, any channels we're going to be able to bring us food. What is the Shanghai only group buying offer? Because I've heard some talk

of this. There are these different types of group buying requests that go out, So you have sort of citywide group buying, and then you also have I think fantasy buying where people put like long shot items that they would really like to have, like burgers from shake Shack and things like that. Yeah, I think I think I

know the uh what you're referencing here. So definitely at the beginning, when group buying was becoming prominent, but nobody was really sure what was out there, people would say, Oh, I'd love to get you know, X item. I'd love to get a delivery of shake Shack. Does anybody know if shake Shack is still open? Can we buy in

bulk from shape Shack? And they weren't. This would be me by the way, during the lockdown, yeah, Or or a more practical one that keeps coming up is like, can somebody group buy some like hair salon some guy to show up inside our you know, a team of guys to show up inside our building and give everybody haircuts because we really need it now. Uh. That's that's

a good fantasy. But no, at that time, Uh, the only things that were available for real besides these fantasy ones was you would go on for example, will say like um, which is a brand underneath pdd pindled big Chinese tech platform, and you would go on there and you would see all these group buy offers and they would say, you know, for noodles or rice or bread

or wherever. But they couldn't actually get into Shanghai because the highway exits leading into Shanghai from outside of the city had checkpoints and it was a one way trip. If you came into Shanghai, you couldn't leave again because it was a city under lockdown. So at that point, either you could find a vendor already in the Shanghai city limits, or you could find a vendor I guess who was willing to make a one way trip. Otherwise there was there there were no or very few options

for Shanghai group buys. Eventually, these big commercial platforms they started clearly noting I like quiet Twine would have limited only to Shanghai, can deliver within twenty four hours thirty six orders of noodles, you know whatever. Uh, They would start noting very clearly that it was only available for Shanghai.

Those are the big tech platforms. Besides that, you also had just hustlers, right, people who knew somebody who knew somebody who has a warehouse out in the suburbs, and the factory workers are close by, and the warehouse workers are sleeping in the warehouse in tents, and they can get you an order of food if you place an order through each head something like that. That was there's a couple of different models. So how do you coordinate

with the other households in your complex? And how did what's the process of Like is someone deputized to actually place the order? Like what is that process work? Like? Yeah, there's two different ways to do that. Uh. The the more functionally smooth one, certainly is to have the uh the app, the software platform quiet Town or another one

set up kind of like a shopping cart. They already have their shopping cart software set up, and so then you go in there, you choose the things that you want from the group by vendor, you click check out, You make sure you write down your address the building that you're in, and then you you spam it. You send it out into the wheat group and you say, hey, guys, I just placed an order on this platform. We only need thirty nine more people to place an order on

this platform. Once we get forty orders, they'll ship it all to our address. Please just go by, go by through this platform. That's the that's the smooth, technologically enabled way, that's more preferable. The less smooth, less technologically enabled way is one person me for example, or another group leader. The group master is the single point of contact. You contact the vendor, you pay the vendor a lump sum, and then you're responsible for individually collecting money from all

the people in your building. I've done both ways. Just the topic of payment, it is non payment ever an issue? Do people say you know, I'm interested and then they don't pay or is it technologically impossible for that to happen because everything is going through you know, things like the red Envelope app where where you can make individual payments on on we Chat and stuff like that. Well, for the technology enabled ones that are going through the platform,

that's all, you know, all very smooth. If you pay, you get what you received, uh, and if the order doesn't mean it's minimum requirement, you get refunded, no problem. When stuff goes through me. Yeah, we're operating a little bit on the honor system for the first couple of orders, I insisted on collecting all the payment first before I or you know, ninety percent plus of the payments before

I felt comfortable making the ball order. But after a couple of times of it all working out, okay, I felt more comfortable just kind of putting my neck out there and going out first and placing a big order for like a thousand bucks of apples or something, and then counting on the fact that my neighbors are going to pay me back. Now, of course they might not, but it's an enclosed environment. We're all neighbors. We all

know each other. Now, you know where they live? Yeah, yeah, exactly, right down to the room number, because I'm delivering the apples to it. Uh so, yeah, it's it's on the honor system for that second one. And we haven't had any real problems. Well, what is the you know, so obviously for any of this to work, there have to be individuals that aren't in lockdown and people who can make the deliveries, and people who can operate the factories

or the you know, the grocery delivery centers. You know. Obviously, in the US, when there were cities that had quasi lockdowns. I mean, we never had like real lockdowns here, but there were people who are designated it, you know, the so called essential workers. How has the government they're sort of established, who can even be in a position to go around the city and make deliveries? Yeah. Sure, so

at the beginning, it was almost no one. That's why we ran into the the issues that we did at the very beginning, where we had an extremely last mile delivery centric model, right, just tens of thousands of last mile delivery drivers all pretty much all removed from the street or maybe just working on a skeleton crew of five percent, three percent something like that. As the days went on and it became apparent that this was going to last longer and that the the last mile delivery

guys had become a huge sticking point in the system. Uh, the major tech platforms, your Jingdong, your Ilama, your your Ma Twine. They recalled lots of workers who were previously in lockdown with their families and said, please come back to work. We'll give you benefits and perks and overtime pay and you can stay in a hotel and you know whatever perks they promised them. They called in drivers from other provinces as well to try to bolster their workforce.

From the management side, I know these guys are required to get a test every day and maybe also an rapid antigen test once or twice throughout the day, and they have what's called a punic and junk like a travel permit specifically for logistics drivers and delivery drivers that you need to maintain a green a green code on

so that you can keep driving around all day. In the last couple of days, I know that they've just mixed up the system for that and they are acquiring a different system for the delivery drivers, and a lot of the guys didn't get it updated in time, and so today we heard some stories of drivers being turned away from compounds because they showed up the gate they didn't have the new code set up yet, and the you know, the gate guard said sorry, we've got orders.

Go go away, come back with your new code. In general, what sort of adaptation have you seen from businesses, because you know, anecdotally I have seen some talk of small scale fruit sellers, you know, type of people who used to have stands outside on sidewalks, maybe those converting into a pure sort of web based selling model and things like that. Have you seen the major platforms and the small scale grocery shops have those adapted to the new situation.

Oh yeah, absolutely, with with different channels and different products. So for a couple of examples, you know my my neighborhood coffee shop right across the street. I used to go there and get a latte almost every day. Now they do bulk orders of fresh milk and coffee beans. And I assume they're acting as a front for one of their vendors, one of their suppliers, right they you know, Hey,

I'm I'm now the last mild delivery point. Uh let me know if you need a bull quarter of thirty six bags of coffee beans, and I'll set that up for you from my vendor. So that's one example. At

least he's still doing stuff related to his actual business. Others, you know, you'd go on on matoon delivery and you'd open up what used to be a crayfish restaurant or uh you know, ah, you know, some skewers or something like that, and you open up and they're selling eggs and packages of fruit and and fresh fresh fresh pork or something. Right like they've got totally different business models now, and they're just maintaining the fact that they still have

a storefront. They still have a listing on the May to one delivery app, or they'll just have a product listing that says doing offline business only. Please add this phone number and we'll discuss on we chat what we have for sale. They're doing everything they can to try to get the message out what they have for sale, even if it's totally unrelated to what their business used to be. Yeah, that definitely happened here during spring of You see restaurants, it seemed like a mix like you'd

see restaurants essentially just selling groceries. You will also had commercial food wholesalers whose customers were typically restaurants, uh suddenly offering retail and so like you could buy like you know, hundreds of pounds of like duck fat or something something

that would typically go to a restaurant. I'm curious also, like how a little bit more about how the informal buying on when you have to use uh weed chat or you just have to get a message out to someone like usually say, like the people sort of like hustling or scraunging things up from a warehouse, Like how do you like find those people and like build those connections and how how does the weed chat based commerce work? Um? Right, So the wee chat based stuff, it comes from a

variety of channels. Sometimes it's a friend of a friend, somebody says, hey, this guy is selling vegetables. Just add him and ask him what's going on. Or maybe it's somebody in your neighborhood. It's, you know, generally a good practice as you become a frequent guest of various businesses in your neighborhood to get to know the people that own them, the local vegetable market seller or your local coffee guy or something like that. So if you had

those in your wee chat already, obviously lean on that. Uh. And then you know the channel I just mentioned where a lot of these stores they maintain an online listing. They've taken all their products off of the shopping cart software except for one, and it's just a picture that says to discuss what products we have, please add my wee ch at and then they give you their phone number. Uh. So that's that's I would say, those are the three main ways where you can try to find somebody who's

hustling and has some stuff to sell. What items have been hardest for you to get hold of? Um? At the beginning, it was all all essentials, and so anything non essential was really hard uh And that included everything from like dairy products besides milk uh two sweets to SODA's things like that. And then as more vendors got into the game, these all became available and you could

buy them. You were you were really only limited by whether or not you could scrounge together enough people to put together a group by I mean, that's always going to be a challenge. At this point, now, I would say, almost everything that I could think of that I want to order, I can order, or I could have ordered if I could have found forty nine more people to order it with me. And maybe you know that's the

limiting factor. But there's there's a vendor out there for almost everything I can imagine now at this point, So it has healed to a significant degree. So what is it what I mean, setting aside the actual like aspect of like ordering foods and other like basic necessities, can you just like walk through a little bit about like what your day to day life is like? Do you are you able to get outside? Do you have space? H is there room or to walk around? Like? What

is or how? What are people doing? Right? So we've had we've had a case in our building in the last seven days, which puts us into the the highest level of of secure zone controlled zone in in theory, we're not even supposed to leave our doors, uh, to the doors to our apartments, but hours like, I think a lot of other buildings have been operating that on the Honor code as well, because I still see people going downstairs. There's nothing there's no security camera at my

door anything like that. I can still go outside and go downstairs. And uh, if I spent a lot of time downstairs hanging out out in the courtyard or something, I'm sure my neighbors would have something to say about me, because we're all supposed to be staying inside our apartments, but there's no actual restriction on, you know, walking down and walking around. I'm a volunteer for receiving our delivery, so I get out a lot already. I get to breathe the fresh air, and I get to spend a

lot of time outdoors. Other people, you know, they gotta walk their dogs or they just want to get some fresh air. I've seen people going out and spending some time outside. I know other apartment compounds and other apartment communities have differing levels of stringency when it comes to this, and in some places are very strict about not leaving

your door at all. What's your sense of the official data that's been out there around cases and supply availability and maybe fatalities as well, versus what you've personally ex varienced and seen on the ground, Because of course, when it comes to China, there are always questions and sometimes doubts about the validity of the official data. So I'm curious how your personal experience stacks up against what's been officially reported. I think, you know, I can only speak

to my own experience. Right What we've seen is cases that we knew a d per, we're in our building, we knew were ad percent, we're in our compound. They showed up, but they took some time, you know, four or five six days between when we knew that case appeared and we thought that person had been evacuated from the building and brought to a medical treatment center, and when that case appeared on the official ledger of of

our neighborhood of our district or subdistrict. So right now, what I can say is, I know there's a lag between when cases appear in real life and when that individual case ends up making its way into the big numbers the official data. Certainly, at the beginning, I think based on what we had seen coming out of statistically from other locations that had on the Crown breakouts, it looks like we were looked like we were seeing a lot of cases with an incompatible number of severe critical

cases and mortality. I would say in the last you know, I haven't been checking the numbers every single day, but certainly I know in the last few days those numbers, unfortunately have been have been rising. And will they end up you know, somewhat statistically, uh, matching to what we've seen from other locations, I don't know, but certainly I think there's been a lag between what we see and what we observe and when it, you know, eventually shows

up in the data. So I mean, bigger picture, I think that in the US observing um, what's going on in Shanghai, I would say the overwhelming perception is sort of incredulity, Like I feel like people just don't get it or they don't believe it, and they like, what am I missing? Because none of this makes any sense. This is so economically damaging, it would appear it's so

psychologically damaging, it's socially damaging. It seems medically implausible, given the virility of some of the latest variants, to even have a COVID zero policy. I think people are just like scratching their heads. They don't have strong opinions per se. They're just really baffled. So what would you say, like, how do you perceive like the goal here, the strategy and sort of like what what victory looks like or what the process looks like? How would you describe it

to someone? Oh? I mean, I think the the image of what victory looks like in an ideal world is pretty clear. It's it's something like what Shenjin did last month. Right, You have a few cases, they pop up, You locked down tighter than a clam, You have excellent local logistics and apparently pretty strong local government support. Everybody puts in their time, and then you re emerge with your case

load almost our adicated. And you know, I know the folks in Shenjen are still having you know, a pretty hefty testing requirement. They're testing every two or three days to make sure they maintain that. But I imagine that's like the platonic ideal for how Chinese city pursuing it's its current uh COVID policy emerges from a localized municipal

COVID outbreak. Now people are going to be analyzing to death whether or not Shanghai couldn't do it because of local government or because they moved too late, or because they were too liberal or whatever it is. Uh. You know, it's clear that shen Jen was the golden standard, and Shanghai has very has missed that by a long shot. So you can understand the desire to achieve something like

shen Jen. Once it's apparent that the you know, the window has closed and the barn door is open and the horses run away or whatever metaphor you want to use, then the question is, okay, is it is it a reasonable ask to try to get back to what Shenjen achieved? Opportunity cost? What are we looking at now? Hey, I'm not an epidemiologist or a biologist or a public health expert, so I don't have strong opinions on what will or

won't work. I think I do understand what they're hoping for, and I think it made sense when you were considering a Shenjen like scenario. Now that we're in the scenario that Shanghai is in, I don't know what they're supposed to do. I certainly hope somebody with a lot of expertise in that field is considering the different, uh the different results we've seen so far from Shanghai, and and

wondering is is a course correction necessary? Does it have to be repeated to every other Chinese city that has an omnicon breakout after this, or is this a Shanghai specific policy. I don't know, but I certainly hope somebody is thinking about it. What's your sense of the sort of broad mood in Shanghai at the moment and support for these policies, because, again to Joe's point, if you talk to people in the US or in Europe, maybe they hear about these very strict lockdowns and they don't

really get it. They're sort of incredulous about all of it. But on the other hand, in China, she President Shi Jinping has been very careful about pitching this as a way to save lives and saying explicitly that they're doing this in a way that's different to what the West has done, where they're willing to accept fatalities in exchange for you know, less harsh lockdowns and more individual freedoms. So how how do you see that portion of it

at the moment? What's the mood? Like? Yeah? I mean, and again, if you if you do it as effectively and efficiently as Shenjen did, you have all nothing but takers. Everybody gets that social contract, they say, we give up our freedoms for a week or two, we get to squash everything, and then we go back to a fairly high quality life like what we had before. Certainly when

this drags on the way it has for for Shanghai. Uh, what I've been seeing and hearing is that even people who are generally I would say pretty supportive of China's COVID policy over the last two years are saying, well, is Shanghai an exception? If Shanghai is an exception, how can we make it the only exception? Because people are bummed out here. I think I think that's fair to say that the people in Shanghai are are low energy they're still they understand the the intent, and they're still

supportive of the intent. But increasingly, I feel, at least from the people around me, the people I see in my building we chat group, things like that people are losing I don't want to say losing enthusiasm for the overall cause, because I think people don't really think like that.

I think there's and I'm just going to go on a ramble tangent here, but I don't think that the people in the midst of a of a lockdown are really the ones analyzing this by saying, ah, should China change its policy on zero COVID now, giving even what I'm going through. No, they're just saying I'm sick of testing all the time, and I'm sick of being confined to my home. And if you told me zero COVID means we get to do it like Shenjen, I love zero COVID, and if you told me zero COVID means this.

I don't know how I feel about this, but I I don't think people are necessarily processing it as like, uh, oh, yeah, we've got to change the way we think about this now. I think most people are just thinking about it on a daily life basis, and I would say, yeah, they're they're sick of it, they're sick of being inside, they're

sick of whatever this is. And if you want to rebrand it, if you want to call it something else, if you want to say this is dynamic zero COVID or now this is uh some version of living with it, but we're still trying to get back to zero. However you brand it, just like, make this better, make my life right now better, and then we can talk about how you label it, David, what are people doing who don't have jobs that can be done on a computer. I've got to imagine they're surviving on the largess of

their employers if possible. If not, then they might be cutting into their savings. I mean, I'm a pretty white collar guy, and most of the people I know are white collar too, so we're all working from home. I know shen Jin had some pretty strict policies back in when I was there about whether or not employers were allowed to dismiss their employees because they weren't working, and

what kind of protections were in place for them. And I haven't seen or heard anything about whether there's something equivalent right now, and so David, we would be remiss if we had you on and if we didn't talk a little bit about electricity in China as well, because this is your day to day job. Speaking of jobs, I want to ask what's your sense of what's happening

with Chinese infrastructure spending at the moment um. And I know you're very interested in renewables, but we did have GDP figures released relatively recently showing a slowdown in growth, which is something you might expect going into lockdown, although the figures actually didn't take that most recent period into account. But do you feel like there's a big wave of fresh infrastructure spending coming to try to offset some of these lockdowns or is it basically impossible to do these

projects given the current situation. Well, I'll say if we talk about offsetting sluggish GDP growth with big infrastructure projects, that gets into macroeconomic questions and I tend to avoid those because I think that's black magic. But I will say from an individual microeconomic perspective, there's massive demand for renewable electricity in a government plans for capacity of of

power and that it has to be green power. Renewable power are are staggering, and that that the cart would pull the horse in that sense where we would say we need to pull up GDP figures. So we're going to increase infrastructure spending. I don't know if that's the

right way i'd think about it. I think of it in terms of we are definitely going to build a lot of green energy, a lot of infrastructure associated green energy because we want it, because we need it, and then maybe that becomes a thing that actually props up g d P, but not necessarily know the other direction the on the microeconomic level, so many international corporations and grid companies and state owned enterprises, everybody has these mandates

to consume a ton of renewable electricity, and all of the grid infrastructure and all the power plants and everything that goes into making those individual microeconomic needs achievable and

meatable means building a lot of stuff. So I guess if you look at it from that perspective, yeah, sure, a lot of infrastructure spending coming in to be able to meet the green development goals is uh just you know, in terms of total energy demand this sort of acute moment, I mean, we've seen global oil prices um well, they're still very high, but they've come down from recent highs.

In part, it would seem very likely because of this collapse of Chinese demand for gasoline and other petroleum products Shaw, so many people are stuck inside their homes. Like what do you view as uh, the sort of the sort of that the size of the current shock to energy demand from these changing consumption patterns and just changing patterns

while the lockdown is happening. Well, certainly if the lockdown right now is just Shanghai, So Shanghai has twenty five million people, which is actually just a drop in the bucket for China if you see, and there's a couple other places that are under lockdown, but most of the country is is business as usual right now. So we're for seeing reduced energy demand. It's probably more macro economic stuff, uh,

more long term macroeconomic stuff. There might be uh kind of domestic consumption instability or domestic consumption kind of uncertainty that would lead to us a bit of a slowdown. But you know, Shanghai individually, I don't think is it's going to be driving that we're gonna have to leave it there. I hope that things start to improve for for you and your neighbors relatively soon. But thank you so much for coming on all thoughts and walking us

through everything that's been going on in Shanghai. Really appreciate it. Yeah, sure, thanks for having me, so, Joe. One thing I was thinking about through all of the was how impossible it would be to do this in the US, not just because I think people would sort of intuitively revolt against it, but also because I don't really think we have the

technology or the platforms to arrange things like this. Certainly, like imagine, well, I guess you could Venmo payments, but it just seems like it would be a massive hassle. Now the software wouldn't exist for like the group purchasing

or group shopping cards. And I remember, of course, you know, one of the first conversations we had over two years ago with with Dan Wong and some of the other technologies that David was just talking about, like you know, the idea of like issuing people a different colored basically passport or a different type of license to be out. You know, we would never have the sort of like agility on a sort of like government or neighborhood level to like issue something like that. So fast and have

people check it for better or worse. Um. I think most people in the US are probably happy that the government can't quickly like issue all kinds of different passports to people for their neighborhoods. But yeah, there's sort of like a degree of like tech that would make something equivalent almost impossible to imagine in the US. Yeah. And the other thing that I found interesting was the speed with which it seems like businesses have actually adapted. And

you mentioned that you saw that here in New York. Um, I guess I never really saw it in Hong Kong because we didn't have a hard lockdown. But it was interesting David's description of like the local coffee shop that is now a bulk supplier of coffee beans. Well, I was in Texas for a while during that spring, and like the local uh text mex place, they would like sell these kits where instead of like ordering enchiladas, you would get this big tray of like beans and chicken

and tortillas to make her own enchiladas. And I thought that was great. I was like, oh, maybe they should be they should all maybe this is how it should stay, Like all the restaurants become like milk companies. Yeah, this

is the other thing. I'm wondering how much of the group buying dynamics stays even if lockdown is sort of you know, if it goes away, because as I said in the intro, group buying has existed in China for a while, and people usually use it to try to get good deals on book buying or just try to secure something that's that's difficult to import without enough people

demanding it. I wonder if if it becomes even more of a thing not specifically related to this, but it's sort of I forgot that in China, a city of twenty five million people, even though it's but you know, the most important city economically, is also kind of a drop in the bucket. You know. You think it's like, oh,

there's this huge hand. Yeah, it's really big. But on the other hand, China is just so enormous that from the grand scale of like Chinese good consumption or energy consumption, it's not like it's not you know, it's not a gigantic share, which China is just on a different scale to everything else. However, what I would say is there have been a lot of anecdotes about smaller villages in

the countryside being locked down completely. Um, there's someone I follow close to Harbin who said the entire village was basically carted off to quarantine. Now there's this talk about Beijing going into lockdown as well, and so you know, there's a lot going on. China is a big country, but it does seem like there's the potential for this to be a very significant economic hit. Yeah, really really extraordinary.

And I just can't imagine, I mean, having kids, having pets, as you mentioned, I just the fact that you know, people are sort of it stretched me as a very psychologically taxing situation, setting aside even uh, concerns about being able to get food in such Yeah, absolutely, all right, shall we leave it there. Let's leave it there. This has been another episode of the All Thoughts podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me on Twitter at Tracy

Alloway and I'm Joe Wisn't Though. You can follow me on Twitter at the Stalwart. Follow our guest David Fishman on Twitter. He's at Pretentious What. Follow our producer Carmen Rodriguez, She's at Carmen Arman. Follow the Bloomberg head of podcast, Francesco Leavi at Francesco Today, and check out all of our podcasts at Bloomberg under the handle at podcasts. Thanks for listening.