On January 14, the Shanghai Municipal Market Supervision and Administration Bureau issued the "Shanghai Blind Box Business Activity Compliance Guidelines", requiring that blind boxes must not sell special foods, drugs, medical devices, toxic and harmful substances, inflammable and explosive materials, live animals, etc., and the price of each blind box must not exceed 200 yuan, and blind boxes cannot be sold to minors under 8 years old.
In recent years, the popularity of the blind box industry has far exceeded everyone's imagination, and the market value of the well-known blind box company Bubble Mart once exceeded 100 billion yuan. Famous behaviorist psychologists in the United States believe that the blind box sets the built-in items as a reward, which strengthens the consumer's behavior of buying the blind box, resulting in consumers suffering from neurobiological addiction.
In addition to this situation, there are also people who buy blind boxes for profit, seeing it as a way of gambling, which creates addiction. People who have come into contact with gamblers may know that their obsession with gambling is no less than that of addicts to drugs.
After the prosperity of the blind box industry, there are countless blind boxes of all kinds, and even many merchants have set their sights on minors and launched a variety of stationery blind boxes to induce children to have a comparison psychology. There are also some blind boxes that have no guidelines at all, what will be issued in the end, all depends on the conscience of the merchant, the promised highest prize will not be issued, and consumers do not know, such as the once popular graphics card blind box. This situation shows that the blind box industry is developing in an unhealthy direction.
Shanghai issued the "Shanghai Blind Box Business Activity Compliance Guidelines" in order to regulate the development of the blind box industry and protect the legitimate rights and interests of consumers. However, Xiao Lei is a little worried about whether the blind box company will come up with any corresponding program. Take the game lottery, card opening package, when the state promulgates regulations requiring the game to disclose the probability or guarantee the bottom line, to avoid online game gambling, there are companies that come up with crooked ideas.
The "Hearthstone" that Xiao Lei often plays needs to open the card package, and after the provisions are issued, Hearthstone will be changed to recharge to buy dust that does not have much value, and send the same number of card packs as the original, so that it does not belong to the recharge card opening bag lottery. The blind box may also adopt the same scheme in the future, and the blind box can be opened by buying some small gifts. In this way, market regulators also need to change regulations according to changes in the blind box industry to avoid being turned into empty by blind box companies.