The "scalpers" prophets of the Spring Festival and the "scalpers" who live in the gray area of the Spring Festival feel the chill brought by the epidemic even more personally. "We have carried through the strict investigation of the policy, but we have not been able to escape the natural disaster of the epidemic." Li Zhi, a veteran scalper with seven years of "working experience", sighed.
The epidemic is raging, and most of the wanderers who are wandering outside have to choose to celebrate the New Year on the spot. The Spring Festival was once jokingly called "the largest cyclical migration in human history", and it has not moved in the past two years.
According to the big data of "Qunar", the popular destinations of the Spring Festival Railway in 2022 are Chongqing, Wuhan, Harbin, Changsha and Guiyang. Compared with the difficulty of finding a ticket in previous years, except for the shortage of second-class tickets on some popular lines, most of the lines this year have surplus tickets on sale.
Based in Beijing, Li Zhi specializes in reselling all kinds of transportation tickets, including high-speed rail tickets and inter-provincial bus tickets. The time lens goes back to before 2020, and every year the Spring Festival is the year-end carnival moment of Li Zhimen. In Li Zhi's eyes, these train tickets are like keys to open the treasure chest of wealth, "just sell them back to customers, and you get these keys."
In the Spring Festival of 2022, Li Zhi's business plummeted, the epidemic prevention and control measures were escalating day by day, and the passenger flow of the Spring Festival was significantly reduced. Li Zhi did not even receive a single ticket snatching business. "There are fewer people going home, tickets are better to buy, and we have no place to play."
The ticket-snatching servers and software that Li Zhi spent a lot of money to buy were also completely reduced to idle supplies, and in order to play their value, Li Zhi "snatched" two tickets back to Harbin for himself and his wife. "In fact, you don't need to grab ticket software, you can buy it yourself." Li Zhi smiled bitterly.
Li Zhi's situation is just a microcosm of the survival of China's thousands of scalpers. Under the sweep of the epidemic, the scalpers who rely on the Spring Festival dividend have long been crumbling.
The pandemic came and I was unemployed
"After the epidemic began, there was no business."
Because she is optimistic about the development prospects of tourism, just after graduating in 2017, Ruan Lin came to Beijing as a ticket agent. At that time, the tourism industry was in a period of vigorous development, and a large number of tour group orders could be received every year during the Spring Festival, and people flew from cold northern cities to warm places such as Sanya, Singapore and Malaysia in Hainan for the New Year.
According to statistics from Ctrip, Fliggy and other platforms, in the last Spring Festival (2019) before the outbreak of the new crown virus, about 400 million people across the country chose to travel for the New Year, and it has maintained positive growth for three consecutive years.
During the Spring Festival at that time, on average, Ruan Lin could receive three tour group orders every month, and the number of tickets was as high as hundreds. When busy, a group has to pay more than 300 tickets, and Ruan Lin has to be "busy until three o'clock in the morning."
The fiery Spring Festival business came to an abrupt end in 2020, with the new crown epidemic hitting and the tourism industry falling to the bottom overnight. Ruan Lin's income plummeted by 70%, from 20,000 yuan to about 6,000 yuan, and even the salaries of her peers were directly reduced to the local minimum wage.
"There are still a lot of colleagues who have gone out of business, and we are not bad, and we have persisted until now." According to Ruan Lin, after the epidemic began, about 30% of the ticketing peers who went out of business or were forced to close their businesses were about 30%.
Along with income, there is also Ruan Lin's consumption level. The middle of 2020 was the most difficult time for Nguyen Lam. In the past, she often went to Sanlitun, Xidan and SKP to go shopping for dinner, and asked friends to drink afternoon tea, but that time was canceled, and even if there was "no discount coupon, even the takeaway did not dare to call."
Incomes are precarious, and colleagues have left the industry. When Nguyen Joined in 2017, the company had 150 employees, and now only 70 are left. Ruan Lin has some "no hit the south wall and no turn back" momentum, she firmly believes that the tourism industry is still promising, even if the best colleague resigned and returned to her hometown, Ruan Lin still stayed.
There is no business, Ruan Lin and the colleagues who stayed behind rely on small talk to relieve anxiety, the content of the chat is various, "as long as they talk to each other without having anything to do with work, the industry downturn is the norm, and we can't always be anxious."
The "air cattle" are in trouble, and the "land cattle" are also having a bad time
Source: Visual China
In 2019 and before, Li Zhi's business has been doing smoothly, and li zhi has made a lot of money just by relying on "old customers bringing new customers". With this fission-style sales model, Li Zhi has never worried about customers.
After 2020, the number of old customers looking for Li Zhi's help to buy tickets suddenly became fewer. "Took the initiative to send WeChat inquiries to old customers, and nearly half of them said they would not go home." There are also people who are worried that taking the high-speed train home during the Spring Festival will have the risk of infection, so they will change to carpooling or renting a car to go home. ”
The new needs of customers have inspired Li Zhixin, who is ready to develop the ride-sharing business. In November 2021, based on his past experience, Li Zhi planned more than 10 routes home and rented more than 10 Coaster minibuses on standby.
Unfortunately, Li Zhi's new business did not get a response from customers. In the customer circle, "the publicity has been carried out for nearly two months, and less than 20 people have signed up, and even the oil money cannot be earned back." In the end, the new business failed.
Once, I bought a house in Beijing through the scalper business
Don't look at the days of scalpers today, in the past when there is no epidemic, the Spring Festival is a carnival moment for them to make a lot of money.
According to Ruan Lin, since she joined the company, her sales have maintained an annual increase of about 20%. The Spring Festival is an important moment for Ruan Lin to sprint performance. In the Spring Festival of 2020, Ruan Lin ushered in the peak of her business, "just the sales in the first three months of the Spring Festival, I achieved close to 2.2 million yuan."
With a good income, Ruan Lin used the accumulated salary as a down payment and bought a house in Beijing. "At that time, I felt that there was no pressure to pay off the mortgage, after all, the mortgage only accounted for 30% of the salary."
In the Spring Festival War, you are grabbing tickets, scalpers are "grabbing money", and they are making a lot of money.
Li Zhi does not hide the huge profits, he will charge an "intermediary fee" of 100-200 yuan for every train ticket for customers, and when the Spring Festival business is good, he can easily earn tens of thousands of yuan a day.
Chinese family concept is extremely strong, and at such an important moment of the New Year, reunion is almost everyone's obsession. People are always desperate to go home for the New Year.
"In the Spring Festival of 2016, a big brother in the northeast entrusted me to grab two train tickets back to Shenyang, and the hard seat sleepers can be used." The eldest brother stressed that as long as you can grab the ticket, you can add as much money as you want. Li Zhi tried unsuccessfully to buy tickets through the relationship, and finally helped the big brother grab two sleeper tickets through online ticket snatching. According to the market, "the intermediary fee for two tickets is 400 yuan, but the big brother feels that the number 4 is unlucky, and directly stuffs me with 500 yuan red envelopes." ”
In order to grab tickets, people look for scalpers, buy acceleration packages, and hollow out their minds, but it is still difficult to find a ticket to catch the peak of the Spring Festival. The lively Zhao Tai took the lead in organizing a long-distance bus to transport customers home.
"Drive the bus to Liuliqiao, Xihongmen and other transportation hubs in Beijing, and the driver pulls people at the door." Zhao Tai told Future Auto Daily that each person charges twice the official fare.
There are many people who are willing to pay for this "high-priced ticket". Although the way of soliciting customers is primitive, it is efficient, "a bus from Beijing to Shijiazhuang, less than half an hour full of departures." During the Spring Festival in 2018, in addition to the driver's remuneration, vehicle rental fees and other expenses, Zhao Tai earned a net of 600,000 yuan.
This is also a "technical work"
It seems that the scalper is a middleman and makes a difference, but in fact, it is not easy to be a scalper, which is a technical job.
In the period of underdeveloped network, scalpers work in roughly two ways: queue up to buy tickets and earn the difference; or through personal relationships, hoard a batch of tickets in advance and sell them for the price.
Usually, on the night before the tickets are released, Li Zhihui organizes the team to queue up in advance at the ticket window of the train station. In order to maximize the income from ticket snatching, in addition to mobilizing relatives and friends around to grab tickets at the ticket window, it is also necessary to hire people to buy tickets, the larger the number, the more profits.
Those migrant workers who do not go home for the New Year are the best candidates in the eyes of scalpers to queue up for tickets. Li Zhi's way of forming a team is very primitive, that is, crouching at the door of the construction site to recruit people, "in the winter, the construction site is stopped, the migrant workers who do not go home have nothing to do, just give them some remuneration, they are very willing to help queue up to buy tickets." According to Li Zhi, the remuneration of each migrant worker is about 30 yuan.
The most "technical content" is the development of the line, in advance of the hoarding tickets. Those travel agency staff and other insiders who can buy tickets are the core competitiveness of scalpers.
Such "comfortable" days did not last long. In 2012, the national railway system began to implement the real-name system of tickets, and the scalper industry suffered a heavy blow. For most scalpers, the days when they could make money by hoarding tickets and selling them at high prices are gone. The 12306APP went online, greatly narrowing the distance between passengers and the railway system, and the living space of scalpers almost disappeared.
But the scalpers weren't completely knocked out, and they began to turn to battle.
Purchasing independent servers and ticket-snatching software, scalpers have transformed themselves into technical bulls for online ticket snatching.
Li Zhi told Future Auto Daily that in order to improve the success rate of ticket snatching, scalpers purchased dozens of computers to fight together, with independent servers to provide powerful computing power, coupled with third-party ticket snatching software. Dozens of devices continue to refresh day and night, and their success rate of ticket snatching is unmatched by ordinary consumers calling friends at home to grab tickets with mobile phones.
In order to avoid the official crackdown on ticket-snatching gangs, scalpers will also regularly change computers and office locations to prevent fixing an IP address from being monitored by the official system.
Before purchasing tickets, customers need to provide Li Zhi with information such as name, ID card number, mobile phone number, login account number and password of the official website. A set of processes, from login, to verification to locking the ticket, takes only 3 seconds at the earliest.
"Computers are eliminated by buying computer cities or Internet cafes, and servers and ticket-snatching software are packaged." During the Spring Festival ticket rush, a gigabit optical fiber should also be pulled to ensure the speed of ticket grabbing. "A set of ticket-snatching equipment, including software and hardware, costs about 80,000 yuan. But that's not a big deal, "when the business is good, you can get your money back in a day." ”
Scalpers have no tomorrow
The arrival of the epidemic has caught everyone off guard and changed everything.
On January 15, Zhou Min, deputy director of the Emergency Office of the Ministry of Transport, said at a press conference that it is expected that the Spring Festival in 2022 will send 1.18 billion passengers nationwide, with an average of 29.5 million passengers per day, an increase of 35.6% over 2021, a year-on-year decrease of 20.3%, and a year-on-year decrease of 60.4% compared with 2019, that is, the Spring Festival before the outbreak of the epidemic.
The scale of the Spring Festival has shrunk, scalpers have borne the brunt of it, the days of monthly income of 20,000 are gone, and the once indestructible customer cities and pools have also fallen apart.
But Li Zhi firmly believes that the Scalpers will not die out due to the epidemic.
Since 2012, 12306 has implemented a series of measures to combat scalpers, such as the real-name system for purchasing tickets, canceling paper tickets, etc. Scalpers have seen tricks and found their own living space.
Under the influence of external factors, the scalpers are indeed shrinking at a speed visible to the naked eye. "At the moment, there are only some large teams in Beijing doing scalper business." But Li Zhi believes that what determines the demise of the scalper is the supply of tickets. "As long as tickets are in short supply one day, scalpers will always be there."
Li Zhi plans to find an ordinary job in Beijing next year to ensure a stable income, but he does not plan to completely abandon the scalper business, and at the same time will also do part-time ticket-snatching work. "After all, there are still some fixed customers, and they will take ticket snatching as a side business in the future."
However, Li Zhi only represents a few people. What more scalpers feel is despair, not because of the industry depression, but because the depression has no end in sight.
Ruan Lin's colleagues saw no hope and changed careers. Some people have done real estate sales, and some people have returned to their hometowns to open a small shop.
Zhao Tai did not plan to do the Spring Festival bus anymore. "We can't 'fight against the wind' anymore, and if we find a case (confirmed with COVID-19) in my bus, the consequences will be unimaginable."
Zhao Tai was ready to go back to his hometown in Heilongjiang first, and what to do in the future, he had not yet thought about it, and everything would wait until the new year.
(In order to protect the privacy of the interviewees, the characters in the article are pseudonyms)
The author | Su Peng Cui Qiuyang
Edit the | Li Huanhuan