The whole wall, divided into 365 small boxes according to 365 days, each small box contains several small bottles, "work place, age, my ideal type, the most unacceptable", personal information and expectations for love are packaged into small bottles, placed on the wall, waiting to be chosen.
This is a once-popular off-single blind box/off-single capsule/fate bottle. Generally speaking, the bottle has only basic information, and the specific information needs to be opened after paying the money to know whether the little brother and sister can harvest satisfaction depends on luck, just like opening the blind box.
The unknown collision of the blind box with the hormones of love has achieved the romantic color of the single blind box, and also made this format once burst into flames.
But just like many Internet celebrity economies, can it last long after the explosion? Does it solve the dilemma of contemporary men and women? Or is it another false consumer demand created by capital and social media?
What is a single blind box?
In the convenience store on Nanjing East Road in Shanghai, Zhou Zhijun saw a whole side of the single capsule, at least a thousand capsules, the boy's bottle was orange, and the girl's pink.
Spend dozens of yuan to visit the bottle joint vote can deliver a bottle, open the bottle need to pay another fee, the bottle only has simple information, and the small note in the bottle has more detailed information and contact information. In order to increase the probability of being selected or improve the degree of matching, many people will write more accurate information on the bottle, such as the requirements for the object, such as the advantage of height 180.
Yangpu Jinsheng Dream Red House Board Game Shop (referred to as "Dream Red House") also has a fate wall, and the gameplay is more mature. Each bottle has a two-dimensional code outside, corresponding to the photo of the bottle owner, scan the code to pay 2 yuan, you can look at the photo and then decide whether to pay again to open the bottle.
There are also derivative gameplay, such as the luxury bottle that invites the bottle opener to drink milk tea, such as the white rich beauty/high-wealth handsome bottle that will be displayed first.
There are also some more "cost-saving" ways to play.
A selfie hall in Lujiazui Zhengda Square once placed a single egg machine, one for boys and one for girls, and if you twist it, there will be a gacha with boy or girl information coming out.
Compared with the fate wall, the single gacha machine is more random and does not have any selectivity.
There is also a kind of online off-single blind box, online random sampling of information. Now in the Mini Program search for single blind box, most of them are already invalid Mini Programs.
The other is more common in night markets, where stall owners set up a stall with two boxes containing information about boys and girls, and a few yuan are drawn once, and the authenticity and validity of the information are unknown.
■ Image source: See watermark why can fire?
Isn't this the move of dating software to the offline, and every time you open the bottle, you draw out a new chat object. Compared to the left swipe in the dating software to get a new chat partner, a few dollars a blind box is undoubtedly more expensive, why play offline blind box?
The answer may lie in this unknown. "Everything can be blinded", and so is dating.
The hormones of love reconcile the sense of the unknown and mystery of the blind box, bursting out of romance and fun, and perhaps interpreting a hint of resistance to facial anxiety.
Zhang Li, who owns a social networking shop called Off Single Left Love Love On Pingjiang Road in Suzhou and has been operating the fate bottle business for many years, believes that the authenticity of the off single bottle information is more guaranteed than the dating software. "Compared with lying in bed late at night playing with mobile phones, in our store in the daytime, customers are more likely to fill in real information." Thirty yuan to deliver a bottle raises the cost of deception, but also screens out the wave of insincere customers. ”
HER (pseudonym) is a local boy in Suzhou after 95, half a year ago he learned about the fate wall from the Internet, since then almost every day after work, he will drive forty or fifty kilometers to play here, half a year, his consumption in the store has reached tens of thousands of yuan.
During the hottest period of the off-order convenience store on Nanjing East Road, Yi Yi worked as a staff member in the store for a period of time and witnessed the hottest time of taking off a single bottle: "That time really kept us busy, and the off-order convenience store was to queue up to enter the scene, and the bottle inventory was not enough." ”
■ The wall of wish-making and friend sticky notes in the convenience store shows its once grand scene
"Someone added WeChat to the store on the spot." Yi Yi said.
"Those who have eyes will directly rush up to WeChat, boys plus girls, girls and boys have, some are embarrassed to let us help contact information." Once, when a boy had just entered the store, a girl rushed over and said that she had bought a ticket for him and wanted to go in and get the boy's bottle. ”
Zhang Li also gave a similar case. "The fastest date in our shop was 18 minutes. 18 minutes ago a girl just handed the bottle and left, a boy smoked her bottle, immediately chased over, 18 minutes later the two people began their first date. ”
However, such a scene seems to only occur when the convenience store is the hottest. One day in December, Zhou Zhijun walked into the convenience store on Nanjing East Road, and the lively scene was not seen. During the one and a half hours that Zhou Zhijun stayed in the store, there were only 5 customers in the store, and none of them purchased a single bottle of products.
The bottles lay horizontally and vertically in the lattice, looking like they had not been taken care of for a long time; the notice next to it said please do not open the bottles at will, but there was no staff supervising them; the broken glass floor was not repaired, and the booths on the high places were even covered with dust.
On the public reviews, there are also negative comments that "it is possible to draw insiders", "a little IQ tax", water leakage, the floor creaks, the wishing wall is messy, and even the bottle is maliciously tampered with.
The single bottle gacha machine in the Selfie Hall in Superbrand Plaza has long been removed. According to the staff, although the mall is located in the center of Shanghai, the customers basically take the family as the unit, and this format that focuses on young singles is deserted in the courtyard of the mall and was moved away after a month.
As a format with obvious economic attributes of Internet celebrities, it seems that the rapid decline is not surprising, and a Hanfu experience store in the same shopping mall as a single convenience store just opened in February 2021 and has now closed its doors.
Zhang Li said that the "left turn" with the wall of fate has opened to five cities across the country and opened more than 10 cooperative stores.
Is it a long-term business?
"Dream Red House" is the introduction of the fate wall as a cooperative store, "the fate wall is more like a scenic spot for us, used to attract customers," the store manager said, saying that the real profit value of the single bottle is broken.
In "Turn Left", the Wall of Fate is part of creating a love atmosphere, and together with love drinks, board games, and script killings, it creates a love atmosphere for single customers who arrive.
Each drink in "Turn Left" has a gimmicky name: "Happy Breakup", "Meet a Good Person", "Please Touch Me".
"In our shop, as long as you like anyone, you can send them a drink and express their hearts with the name of the drink. Giving away drinks is a great way to break the ice. ”
Zhang Li introduced that among so many drinks, the best selling is "meeting a good person", followed by "happy to break up".
Script killing, board games are a new type of dating method in recent years, many script killing shops and even the main dating book, so that single men and women in the game to cultivate feelings to observe each other. It is reported that the "left turn" can open four or five script killing rounds at the same time every weekend, and there can be dozens of people in a store.
In the past six months, HER has spent five or six hundred just inviting people to drink milk tea, sometimes inviting the girl she likes in the same script bureau, and sometimes inviting the staff. He had seen hundreds of bottles of fate, almost every bottle of the opposite sex. The board games and books in the store, he basically played, played until later, and even took the initiative to do the script to kill DM (host).
■ Customers who play board games in the "Dream Red House"
"Ambience" is a point that both store managers and HER emphasize.
On the day of the visit, Zhou Zhijun walked into the "Dream Red Chamber", not only did the staff come to introduce the play of taking off the single bottle, but also the regular customers in the store also came to gag and joke, and the social fear of Zhou Jun immediately relaxed, and picked up the bottle in a bright and upright manner.
In the "Dream Red Building", many of them are regular customers who often come to the store to play board games, and there are only a dozen member customers who are fixed to the store every day, including students from nearby universities, freelancers, and employees of Internet companies. Some people think of this place as a café for self-study and work, some people are used to come to the store to sit down after work, and people are enough to save up a game of script at any time. The seeds of love are slowly planted in a relaxed atmosphere.
For HER, the staff in the store has long been friends, not only a place to find love opportunities, but also a place to relax after work.
For customers who come to the store once, whether it is the love atmosphere in the air of the off-order convenience store in the peak season, or the relaxed love atmosphere created by the left turn of the single and the dream red house board game store, it is not so strange to open the conversation. "We want to make it a reasonable thing for the sister to turn the han into a single left," Zhang Li introduced. Here, a variety of online love strips are arranged.
■ Image source: See watermark
For Chinese with introverted personality, hooking up is not a simple thing. Taking off a single bottle may be the contemporary "the moon is so beautiful tonight", and it is also a tool for young people to refuse the paternalistic direct blind date of "for the purpose of marriage".
From time to time, Zhang Li's shop can receive pennants sent by couples after they finally become dependents, and no less than 100 have been received before and after. According to reports, since the opening of the small building in 2018, thousands of couples have successfully held hands.
Can you really get off the list?
In other stores, the single blind box is one of the channels for marriage intermediaries and blind date services. Essentially, this is still an economic act. Young people refuse to put a price tag in the blind date corner, but what is more commodity than putting people in bottles and putting them on the shelf?
Unfortunately, people are not commodities. The loss of dismantling the blind box of the toy may only be a repetition of acquisition, and the probability of economic behavior to mask the uncertainty in emotional behavior is blinding the eyes of single people who are ready to meet love. Perhaps more important to ponder: "Are contemporary singles short of opportunities to fall in love?" ”
Wu Mufeng, who threw bottles in the "Dream Red Chamber", was initially attracted by the novelty of taking off a single bottle. However, from the delivery of bottles in July 2020, only two girls have come to add WeChat in a year and a half, but because of busy work, adding WeChat has no time to chat about it.
"Although I am only 25 years old, I don't want to wait any longer, I feel that feelings are important and cannot be postponed any longer. I have always felt that feelings are a very sacred thing, and I expect two people to like each other, appreciate each other, accommodate each other, and go in both directions together. "HER is full of yearning for harvesting feelings.
After staying in the store for half a year, HER still hasn't taken off the order. After seeing hundreds of bottles, the last WeChat added is only single digits, "a lot of three views do not match or I do not meet the requirements of the other party, there is no need to add WeChat." ”
"Many girls require tall and handsome, I think I am not tall or handsome, then there is no need to open the bottle; many girls reject the Puxin man, although I don't know what is Puxin male, but I think it is quite ordinary and confident, this bottle I will not dismantle." 」
For him, the three views are in line with the more important criteria for mate selection, whether the information is written comprehensively, whether the photos are taken seriously, are the criteria for examining whether the other party is sincere.
After seeing so many customers in the store who came to love, Zhang Li said: "We found that it is easy to take off the single, it is easy to take off the single, you can get off the single once, it is difficult to take off the single often, and it is not necessarily related to whether it looks good or not." ”
What does that have to do with it? "It's related to the concept of love and the skills of love." Zhang Li concluded.
He added: "We think it's more than twice as difficult for girls to find a partner than for boys, and sometimes the better they look, the more they can't find it." ”
Yi Yi also said that most of the people who came to the convenience store were girls, and finally the boys' bottles were emptied. Some girls are in good condition and lack of objects that make Yiyi feel confused. "Once a girl who had a house and a car looked good, and she also came over to throw bottles, and specially spent one or two hundred to cast a 'white and rich beauty' bottle. At that time, I thought, the conditions are so excellent, do you still have to use this way to find a partner? ”
Zhang Li said that in the near future, a single-off complex will be opened in Suzhou, which is an upgraded version of "single left turn", positioned as "Suzhou young people's dopamine hormone gathering place", so that the atmosphere of love is more intense.
Before turning left, Zhang Li did offline social networking for a period of time, but finally had to make adjustments because he did not make money, focusing on the profitability after the single social networking situation greatly improved. It seems that love money is sometimes easier to earn.
Whether it is off the bottle or off the single script to kill, love is just needed, is one of the eternal topics of human emotions, is one of the sources of creating economy, as long as human beings still have feelings, love goods have always had a market.