A convenience store in Chengdu. Courtesy of respondents
In Beijing, a girl writes her ideal lover, "handsome guy" outside a blind box. Guo Yujie/Photo
In Chengdu, two girls write about introducing themselves in a drop-off convenience store. Courtesy of respondents
It could be a bottle, a note, a code, bringing a complete stranger.
You'll "pass friend verification", send "hello", click on the other person's circle of friends, quickly turn the page, and look for a photo where you can see the face. You speculate on the other person's social media footprints, like an explorer studying the footprints of an unknown group of creatures in the field. If you're lucky, you'll be able to chat with a "stranger" for dozens of sentences and meet up. But more often, you only see the content of "only three days visible", and your fate also comes to an end within 3 sentences.
This is usually the situation that you have to face after you open the "single blind box".
Blind boxes of everything, dolls, books, airline tickets, cosmetics, pets... Today there are also "people". Since the summer of this year, "off-order convenience stores" have appeared in Shanghai, Chengdu, Zhengzhou, Suzhou, Lanzhou and other cities. Shops sell single blind boxes or capsules, spending dozens of yuan, customers can store personal information, including height, age, description of the ideal partner, contact information, etc., you can also pick a bottle to open, get another person's information. Unless the customer asks for "takedown" himself, the store will not remove the blind box that has been dismantled.
There is no physical box, but there is no difference in the essence of the "online single blind box" also came. In the pages of the social media mini-program, two rectangular virtual boxes identify the gender with blue and pink. Customers who spend $1 each time can choose to draw or put in a "note", who will be drawn out and allegedly completely random.
A month ago, a game software development company began to receive orders to build an online off-order blind box program, and a salesman told China Youth Daily and China Youth Network that they had received more than 80 orders and were "very busy."
A script killing physical store in Beijing's Chaoyang District also launched a blind box add-on business. Two walls of the store are occupied by display cases. In the 384 small grids classified by constellations, dates of birth and personalities, dozens of 6-centimeter-tall vials are scattered, transparent for women and dark for men. All bottles have a spotlight in the "cubicle".
The owner is a post-90s generation, and he feels that these small bottles are like the "time teleportation gun" in the American cartoon "Rick and Morty". He spoke, simulating the gesture of firing a shot. "You can be sent anywhere to meet anyone."
The man in the box
"My perspective is God's perspective." A clerk at a de-order convenience store in Zhengzhou said.
When a customer fills out, picks or opens a blind box, she stands next to it. She saw that someone had to send a "self-introduction" in one sentence; someone had to bury his head and write for ten minutes, write a wrong word, wipe it off with his hand, and was not willing to leave a black spot on the paper, so he changed a piece of paper to rewrite.
A girl who was in the blind box business at a street stall in Guangzhou remembered that a boy once threw a note and stuffed her with a "Sailor Moon" toy and told her that if a girl drew his note, she would give her the toy.
Two months after opening, Xiao Shi, the owner of the Chengdu off-order convenience store, already has more than 2,800 single youth blind boxes in his hands, and this number is still growing at a rate of 100 per day. In the self-introductions he has seen, some people have written "I am a handsome guy", some people have written "I plan to get married in 3 years, have children in 5 years, and then I will have 3 children".
Xiao Shi said that there are girls who live nearby who come to the store 3 times a week, each time to open a few bottles, and will ask the owner "Is there a handsome guy today, if there is any, I will go right away"; someone just sent him a WeChat message saying "take off the order, take my bottle off the shelf", and the next day broke up again, asking him to put the bottle back; a man born in 1992 who claimed to be a bank executive came here, looking for a woman born between 1994 and 1996, and dismantled 80 bottles in one go. But he "just looked at it" and did not give others the opportunity to open his blind box.
Gao Ming (pseudonym) was one of Xiao Shi's earliest customers. He met nearly 20 women through the convenience store, some of whom came from Xiao Shi's active introduction. For a while, he had to meet with different girls the next day, and he saw 7 in a row.
Gao Ming called himself "single for too long". One day in August, after two years of college and doing software research and development, he and his friends went to the mall to watch movies. It was his old friend who was still in Chengdu. When he was in college, Gao Ming had a wide range of hobbies, playing basketball, playing music, and calling friends to introduce classes. After graduation, everyone went to Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Beijing to develop. He now shares a room with a few colleagues, but he hardly speaks and huddles into his room when he gets home.
After the movie, a friend's girlfriend came and asked him to eat together, but he "didn't want to be a light bulb" and left alone. During that time, his desire to fall in love became urgent, "too lonely.". When he wanted to play basketball, he would go to the basketball court with the ball and randomly form a team to "play wild ball".
On the way home from the theater, he saw the convenience store, walked in curiously, and almost without hesitation, spent 29.9 yuan to store the information in a blind box. On the note, he wrote the "secret code" that linked him: eat double. He originally wanted to open the blind box, but after looking around, he found that "all are post-00s", the age gap is large, and he walked away.
The blind box containing his code was later taken apart by many people.
Adventure tours
If playing off the single blind box is an adventure, most of the time you will not have any surprises to discover.
Gao Ming knows that in the matter of finding a girlfriend, a height of more than 1.85 meters is his advantage. But he didn't expect that the only girl he had come into contact with through the convenience store that moved him, when asked "what do you like about him," said "height" bluntly, and "just height."
In Gao Ming's view, this girl "has her own ideas" and will express her views on current affairs, and the chat between the two can be extended. They went on 4 dates and kept in touch for almost 2 months, and on one date he held each other's hands.
Until the answer "just height" appeared, which made him feel that "the conversation collapsed".
Off-order convenience stores have expanded the high-pitched heterosexual social circle, but most of the opposite sexes removed from the blind box are "very similar", the common point is "not serious", and some even "like raising fish, enjoying the feeling of being pursued". His seriousness will vary from person to person, and someone will keep looking at the phone when they first meet, and he will gamble to look at the phone. He would be honest that he was in contact with a lot of people at the same time and the girls didn't care. Such a date is brisk, meet the type of dislike, such as introverted, not serious people, after going back he will directly send each other WeChat said: "We are not suitable, the next one is better, come on." ”
According to Xiao Shi's statistics, the blind box in the store contributed to 32 couples, but based on 2900 people, this proportion is still quite low. Gao Ming is one of the large base numbers that has not yet been singled. Xiao Shi also heard that 8 of the 32 pairs have broken up, and the longest insisted on at present is one month, "young people, they are all trying."
Gao Ming believes that he has "good conditions" and is not difficult to find a girlfriend, "but he wants to fall in love", and his emotional requirements are relatively high. He believed more that the people the shopkeeper had introduced to him separately, through the blind box, "mostly just played." Gao Ming felt that in fact, there was not much difference between the single blind box and some stranger social software. He claimed that he had never used detectives or Momo and felt that it was not formal enough. Xiao Shi has seen many online single blind box programs, and he has heard customers say that most of the people drawn by these programs are bartenders, micro-businessmen and those engaged in the pornography industry.
After paying 1 yuan, a girl who works in Beijing drew a boy with an online single blind box, and soon she couldn't talk anymore, she asked how old the other party was, and the other party said, "I am already two thousand years old." There are also girls who carefully fill out a large paragraph of self-introduction, but the person who spent 1 yuan to draw, the introduction is "haha". "This kind of person thinks that by posting a photo and hooking his hand, he can find a girlfriend." "Don't fall in love with someone whose self-introduction says 'haha.'"
Some people will provide false personal information in the blind box, some people will deliberately leave or leave the wrong contact information, and some people will deposit the other party's contact information into the blind box in order to maliciously retaliate against someone. In the case that WeChat cannot be added, some stores will choose to refund money to customers, and some will not.
"To play games, you have to be mentally prepared." Xiao Shi once asked professional legal personnel to avoid legal risks for the store, they do not require customers to fill in sensitive personal information, such as real name, ID number, mobile phone number, and the authenticity of the information in the blind box, but also rely on customers to verify.
Xiao Shi said that his shop is an Internet celebrity punch card, and many people "come here to visit" and do not think about really developing any couple relationship. Some people simply do not leave a WeChat signal, "the bottle is stored, just a kind of sustenance, as if I have made an effort to get rid of this thing."
The single blind box is hot by the network. The size of the short video platform Internet celebrities, with almost uniform words to promote this new thing - "I heard that the super hot off-order convenience store in the ×× also has the same model!" "It only costs $9.9 to take an object with you." "A whole wall of objects for you to choose from!" "The decoration is very suitable for fairies to punch in and take pictures." And across the country, "off the single convenience store" and the "lost love museum" packaged launch, in the store video, the Internet celebrities walked out of the curtain written "off the single", and then walked into the museum filled with breakup souvenirs.
Encounters and breakups are important links in this industry chain. According to Ai Media Consulting's "China Mobile Social Industry Research Report in the First Half of 2021", it is expected that China's adult single population will reach about 250 million in 2021. According to the statistics of the "Enterprise Investigation Data Research Institute", in the 10 years since 2011, a total of 474 financings have occurred in the social circuit of strangers in China, and the total amount of disclosure has reached 29.299 billion yuan.
Some people recommend the online single blind box as an "Internet light entrepreneurship project", and some netizens post the account balance of "81076.25 yuan", saying "this is my income this month" and "a small box, actually let me earn 100,000 yuan a month". A newly graduated college student in Guangzhou is doing an agent for the online blind box off-order platform, what he wants to do is to promote, post on various platforms to seek customers to open the blind box. At first, he earned more than 200 yuan a day, but on the fourth day he only had 50 yuan. The heat dissipated so quickly that he didn't do it anymore. Previously, after graduating from college, he relied on scattered Internet entrepreneurship projects for a living, and his work was full of anxiety about constantly "catching up", and last year, he built a new house in his hometown.
Same sky
Liu Qiangqiang (pseudonym) felt that he had been surprised by removing the blind box. He wanted to tell the lucky story to everyone.
He and his girlfriend, the 32 couples who have successfully taken off the order in Xiao Shi's shop, have been together for the longest time - they have been in a relationship since September 5. Liu Qiangqiang said that they were each other's first love, he once declared to his parents that he would not fall in love before the age of 26, and now that he is in love, he always laughs for no reason. He placed a storage box under the passenger seat of his private car, containing his girlfriend's favorite pickled pepper chicken feet, brine eggs, potato chips, and labeled "girlfriend exclusive seat". He had never been in the kitchen before, but a few days ago he had cooked dishes sent to his girlfriend's school, determined to "increase his cooking skills". He quit smoking, ate lollipops when he wanted to smoke, ate five or six sticks a day, and ate until his teeth hurt. A colleague said he now speaks "girly", he said, "This is called gentleness". When they first met, his girlfriend wore a long green dress, and he was completely attracted, although he claimed to hate green.
Liu Qiangqiang said that he liked his girlfriend's "slightly accented dialect" and "not very smart head", and his favorite was that the other party had not been in love, "I value chastity".
After dismantling the blind box on September 2, he added WeChat in the box. On the same day, he called the girl who had been unpacked in the blind box for 2 hours. Liu Qiangqiang remembered that the girl's voice sounded very thin and gentle. In the past, he used to stay up late and love to brush "sad copywriting", but now, he calls his girlfriend every day until 11 o'clock at night, and then "obediently shuts down and goes to sleep". He used to eat breakfast almost never, and now he eats on time as his girlfriend asks. During the call, he coughs and will get the care of his girlfriend; he used to hold back when he had a heart matter, and now he will tell his girlfriend.
Seeing Liu Qiangqiang's "off-order", several male friends around him rushed to the off-single convenience store, and several claimed to have found the object, but Liu Qiangqiang "felt that they were all joking, and within a few days they were separated into a pair."
Someone in the blind box set the code for adding friends to each other to "Kill and don't kiss each other". Liu Qiangqiang's unit once arranged a friendship with a brother unit, but he did not go because he felt that "the friendship meeting is a comparison conference", or depends on the conditions. His father arranged five or six blind dates for him, "all introduced by his business partners", and Liu Qiangqiang did not go. He did not like this kind of marriage tied to the family, and said to his father, "If one day our family goes bankrupt, who am I and who are you?" ”
At the same time, Liu Qiangqiang and his peers are constantly looking for random fate. In the script killing physical store in Beijing that has opened a blind box business, strangers often play "emotional books" together, and some people come alone to meet new friends. After an immersive script killing, a boy once added a WeChat message playing a couple with him in the play, saying, "In the past few hours, you are my girlfriend, can we continue in reality?" ”
The owner said that a few days ago, while killing the script with an emotion, a girl called him out and told him if he could arrange himself and the boy with the glasses to be a couple. It was supposed to be a heavy script, but he saw that during the game, both men seemed to enjoy it. For the sake of the game, in one of the links, the shopkeeper asked, "Your love is shattered, do you know why now?" According to the plot, everyone here should be silent, but the boy was surprised and said, "Is our love broken?" ”
After the script killing, the girl said that the blind box she had left in the store had been drawn by the boy with the glasses, and that was how they met.
Xiao Shi held a "99-day no-breakup challenge" activity at the off-order convenience store, promising that if successful, there would be a big gift. At present, the most promising to get this gift is Liu Qiangqiang and his girlfriend. But Liu Qiangqiang said they were not in love for that challenge.
Before he met his girlfriend, when he was sad, he would go to the rooftop on the 19th floor of the community to watch the night view, and he almost never went again after "taking off the single". The last time he went up, he found that the cityscape that had made him feel "desolate" now made him sigh "beautiful".
Intern Guo Yujie Source: China Youth Daily
Source: China Youth Daily