Current and former employees at German grocery delivery startup Gorillas describe arbitrary firings and exploitation of riders and warehouse workers
“It's like the new WeWork story,” says Ben*, who joined Gorillas' operations team last summer in Berlin. — The comparison to coworking company WeWork is a brutal one. Tweets: @siftedeu , @fpratty , @mstothard , @davidbaratech , @hkanji , @mparts_ , @mstothard , and @siftedeu Tweets: Sifted / @siftedeu : In two years, Germany's @gorillasapp has seen its employee count skyrocketing from 13 people in July 2019 to around 1,949 in July 2021, according to @dealroomco. Too much, too fast to build a healthy company culture? 🙃Here's what its staff told us: https://sifted.eu/... https://twitter.com/... Freya Pratty / @fpratty : “My biggest fear is that the whole thing will implode and that's one of my moral issues with the company — that we're leading people on.” @mparts_ and I have been talking to current and former employees about what's going on at Gorillas. https://sifted.eu/... Michael Stothard / @mstothard : Fast-delivery startup Gorillas is predicting its ARR to grow from $34m in January to $2.6bn by the end of the year, according to a presentation prepared for investors in April seen by Sifted. That's insane growth. 🤯 But at what cost? https://sifted.eu/... David Baratech / @davidbaratech : I've been running @ulabox, an online grocery store, the first pure player in Spain for the last 10 years. A few thoughts here regarding this @gorillasapp issue 🧵 https://sifted.eu/... Hussein Kanji / @hkanji : No one wants to be labeled a WeWork https://sifted.eu/... Miriam Partington / @mparts_ : Many of Gorillas' employees Sifted spoke to paint a picture of a company that is growing faster than it can handle - potentially putting the livelihoods of employees and hundreds of millions of investor cash at risk. But is this the whole story? https://sifted.eu/... Michael Stothard / @mstothard : Sifted has spoken to nine people at Gorillas who have accused the company of arbitrary firings, exploitation of riders and warehouse workers, as well as a hostile environment at the HQ. Others have raised questions about the cash-burning business model. https://sifted.eu/... Sifted / @siftedeu : Culture of fear, highly-ambitious founder and lack of job security: what's going on at on-demand grocery startup @gorillasapp? 😮 @mparts_ and @FPratty look beyond the company's $1bn valuation: https://sifted.eu/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Two months before Gorillas' land-grab moment in Europe's instant-grocery race went fully public, Sifted's reporting captured what hypergrowth was doing inside the company: headcount had jumped from 13 people in July 2019 to around 1,949 by July 2021, and current and former staff describe arbitrary firings, a hostile headquarters environment, and exploitation of the riders and warehouse workers who actually run deliveries.
The WeWork comparison drawn by a former operations employee proved prescient rather than rhetorical — within ten months of the company's nearly $1B raise at a ~$3B valuation, Gorillas had laid off half its global office workforce and moved to cut benefits and close warehouses.
First-order effects
- Gorillas' riders and warehouse workers face the direct brunt: the allegations cover exploitative conditions for exactly the workforce its 10-minute delivery promise depends on, while office staff report arbitrary terminations during the scale-up from 13 to nearly 2,000 people.
- Investors including Delivery Hero, which put $235M into the October round, now hold stakes in a company whose labor practices were flagged publicly months before the money landed.
Second-order effects
- Rival Flink and other instant-grocery players in the same funding land grab face pressure on their own rider conditions and warehouse practices, since Sifted's reporting set a template for scrutinizing labor across the category.
- The cost-cutting, benefit reductions, and possible warehouse closures that followed within a year validate employee claims that spending outran unit economics, tightening the labor market's view of quick-commerce employers broadly.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Europe's instant-delivery sector consolidates around operators who can sustain both margins and labor standards, with regulators and worker organizers gaining a documented case study in what venture-funded speed-first growth costs frontline workers.
- The trajectory from culture exposé to mass layoffs to warehouse closures points toward quick-commerce maturing from growth-at-all-costs toward the discipline phase, with hiring freezes and operational retrenchment becoming the norm rather than the exception.
The trend: Venture-funded instant-grocery startups are learning that scaling headcount faster than culture and unit economics produces the same reckoning WeWork faced, with labor practices as the leading indicator.