Unpaid salaries, unsafe bicycles: chaos reigns at Gorillas

Joseph Skull, a black-clad British bicycle courier from delivery company Gorillas, is looking for a parking spot for the massive electric cargo bike he just used to carry a paper bag full of morning groceries. “They haven’t picked up the garbage yet – they often do,” he says on Monday morning, pushing aside a bag of empty bottles.

The sidewalk opposite the branch of the German express delivery service in the Amsterdam district of De Pijp is barricaded by Gorillas bicycles, overflowing garbage containers and bins with discarded packaging material. The truck that, meanwhile, is bringing a few boxes of fruit, can’t stand anywhere at all and is forced to stop in the middle of the roadway. The cars behind him just have to wait.

A few days later – last Friday – this Gorillas branch on Gerard Douplein had to close by order of the municipality. According to the municipality, the distribution center did not fit into the zoning plan and the shopping couriers caused a lot of nuisance in the neighborhood. Gorillas’ objections to the proposed closure were brushed aside by the judge on Thursday.

Gorillas (motto: ‘faster than you) is a delivery service that claims to deliver groceries to your home within minutes of an online order. The company was founded by Kagan Sümer at the beginning of the pandemic in Berlin. In two years Gorillas grew into a company with 15,000 employees and locations throughout Europe and the United States. Investors provided the company with huge seed capital and, partly due to all the lockdowns, the need for fast home delivery seemed almost limitless.

Until now. Gorillas are suddenly under fire on all sides. Neighbors complain about nuisance, municipalities are trying to ban the service and investors are demanding that the company’s finances be sorted out, according to websites. Sifted and Techcrunch loses between $60 and $90 million each month. Of the $1 billion “war chest” that the company had at its disposal less than a year ago, only $300 million is left, according to tech websites. This has made Gorillas a symbol of the madness among venture investors, who in recent years have been provoked by ultra-low interest rates to invest billions in companies without a clear revenue model.

Gorillas is also a company for employees on steroids, say various (former and current) deliverers and employees of distribution centers in the Netherlands. From the conversations a picture emerges of a company that is growing far too fast and that the most basic aspects of running a delivery service – salary payment, inventory management, bicycle maintenance, administrative processes, relationships with governments – are not or hardly in order.

Extremely fast growth

The closure of the Gerard Douplein branch is more than a symptom of the growing pains of a young company. Behind the closed, white facade of the Gorillas building was the busiest distribution point of the delivery service in the Netherlands, where more than a thousand bags of groceries were packed and delivered every day on Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

It’s also the place, right around the corner from the Albert Cuypmarkt, where Gorillas’ international expansion began on Wednesday, December 16, 2020 – in one of Amsterdam’s busiest locations, surrounded by dozens of restaurants, shops, market stalls and supermarkets. The area includes one Aldi, three Albert Heijns, a Dirk van der Broek, a Coop, two Jumbos and two large suppliers of organic goods.

Although almost every resident of De Pijp can be in a shop within one minute, the idea of ​​orders delivered within ten minutes caught on. Research agency GfK calculated in February this year that about 1 in 35 Dutch people sometimes uses a flash delivery service. Young city dwellers in particular have small groceries such as (soft) drinks, chips and cigarettes delivered to their home. Gorillas also sprinkled discount codes, making the service attractive to students as well. They had bottles of cola and sweets delivered to the schoolyard.

When the Netherlands reopened after the lockdowns, municipalities became increasingly skeptical about the blessings of flash delivery, especially because of the nuisance it causes in the residential areas where the distribution centers are located. Branches in Amsterdam, Leiden, The Hague and Utrecht, among others, were closed and permits blocked.

The economic tide also turned. The flash delivery services all hoped they could stay in the race longer than their competitors, raising prices and turning a profit at a later stage. Rising interest rates make it increasingly difficult to find the money needed to sustain this fight. And so the companies are forced to cut costs.

Gorillas competitor Zapp fired hundreds of delivery drivers via a Zoom call this week and departed from the Dutch market. That announcement followed shortly after the forced closure of a Zapp branch near Gerard Douplein. Gorillas recently left Italy, Spain, Belgium and Denmark and laid off 300 workers in Berlin. The company says it has no plans to leave the Netherlands yet.

Read more about the layoffs at Gorillas and other speed cameras: ‘Sentiment around start-ups has changed radically’

The staff had been anticipating the problems with the delivery service for a long time. Gorillas changed under their eyes from a cheerful and small-scale start-up to a chaotic and rushed employer that increased the pressure on employees to work faster and cheaper. “It started out as the ideal job – paid cycling through the city, with a team of young people,” says Norbert Faller, one of the first employees of the De Pijp branch. “But it soon became apparent that nothing was functioning properly.”

The biggest source of employee frustration: the paycheck. All employees NRC spoke to know the problems. Overtime that is not paid, unverifiable amounts on payslips and staff who still owe money from Gorillas after their departure.

“I got a different amount every month,” says Faller, who worked for Gorillas for over a year. “Our pay stub is so complicated that it took management half an hour during a meeting to explain to us what it said.” Lucas Mendes, a Brazilian who worked for Gorillas for eight months as manager of the distribution center in Watergraafsmeer in Amsterdam, confirms the picture. “All payments were late and wrong. Every month I had to check my salary. You start to mistrust the company.”

And there are more problems. Trucks loading and unloading and cyclists in an enormous hurry cause nuisance for local residents. Gorillas also produce an enormous amount of waste: from packaging material to superfluous stocks, which are not properly geared to the needs of the consumer due to a purchasing system that functions poorly. “We didn’t have enough space, so cartons of milk were left out of the fridge all day,” says Faller.

The permanently changing workforce, which meant that employees were constantly confused about what exactly had to be done, was also problematic. “Then we got a new manager, who had never been to a branch before,” says Faller. “Or suddenly a crew of Indians and Bangladeshi was at work, only one of whom spoke a little English. If they got lost with an order, it was impossible to communicate with them.”

In addition, they had to go out with unsafe bicycles, say employees. They complain about non-functioning brakes, missing phone holders and non-waterproof clothing. The exact numbers of accidents involving speed cameras are not known, but every Gorillas employee knows a story about a colleague who ended up in hospital because of a malfunctioning bicycle.

Such as Luke Ridgeway, an Australian who worked at Gorillas in Utrecht last year and had an accident after only four days on the bike. “There was no phone holder, so I was forced to hold my phone,” he says. “I was looking at it to navigate and was hit by a car. I broke a rib. Three days later I heard that I had been fired. The reason: the computer records showed that I had been absent for a few days in a row. The system didn’t understand that I didn’t show up because of a car accident.”

Understanding and patience

Sadik Cevik, director Gorillas for the Netherlands, told during a small media offensive at On 1 and news hour that employees receive training that guarantees the safety of cyclists on the street.

Australian Luke Ridgeway laughs out loud when asked about it. “Training? There is no workout. You just cycle behind a colleague during a delivery ride and then you start,” he says. Norbert Faller: „You ask a random one rider who has to do no delivery for a while: explain to the new one how it works. That’s the workout. Everyone on the shop floor is very helpful, but we were just too busy for that sort of thing.”

Another argument Gorillas likes to make when confronted with complaints from local residents and employees is the company’s short history. This kind of hassle is part and parcel of a start-up, they say. If the outside world has a little more understanding and patience, it will all work itself out.

Reinier van Velden, who after a long career as a lawyer and jurist has been looking after the legal affairs of Gorillas in the Netherlands for two and a half months, also says this. After the summary proceedings last Monday between his employer and the municipality, he talks about “growing pains”, and emphasizes that “the will is there to do better”. He gives a personal example: he did receive a salary, but no pay slip. “On the HR side, the system sometimes fails. Then you call and it will be solved.”

For Joseph Skull and the dozens of colleagues who now have to leave the location on Gerard Douplein, we have to wait and see. “We are going to move some of the stock to other locations,” their Gorillas manager emailed after announcing the closure. “I can assure you that everyone keeps their jobs. The ride isn’t over.†